At some point, I strongly suspect, Apple upgraded all their OS development employees to SSDs, and they just stopped caring about HD performance. I don't know w

At some point, I strongly suspect, Apple upgraded all their OS development employees to SSDs, and they just stopped caring about HD performance. I don't know when that was exactly. 9-10 years ago or thereabouts? I just quite distinctly remember the experience of upgrading the OS, and straight away finding that the boot time had gone from 15 seconds to 1 minute :( That was annoying back then, but I don't think it's a problem nowadays. Technology has moved on, just as it moved on from the floppy disk and the Pentium 3 and so on. If anything, mechanical hard drives are doing well to still be useful - the price/performance/capacity tradeoff remains decent! Just not decent enough to use one as your boot drive.