"Maybe the Wintel intentional software bloat to sell more hardware has reached a critical mass and can't be stopped." Having worked on the performance team for

"Maybe the Wintel intentional software bloat to sell more hardware has reached a critical mass and can't be stopped." Having worked on the performance team for Windows Vista (yes--it actually exists), I can tell you first hand that there's no conspiracy here. Instead, there are thousands of developers each solving problems in their parts of the OS without a holistic view of the impact of their tiny little growth in memory use or CPU consumption or processes required at startup. Each team's impact is minuscule, but in aggregate, adds up to enough to fully use a new generation of hardware. The perf team can help fix some of that, but only so much. And they only bother winning enough battles to make Windows run on the hardware that people willing to buy an OS upgrade are going to put it on. The vast majority of these buyers are tech freaks like us, or people buying a new machine from an OEM, so it's not malice so much as lazily chasing the easy dollars that causes commercial OSes to run best only on near-latest hardware. Fwiw, Apple's similarly lazy...