50 ms·

We are already there, to be honest. 20% every two years is negligible compared to growing inefficiency of software. I have to replace my computer every several

We are already there, to be honest. 20% every two years is negligible compared to growing inefficiency of software. I have to replace my computer every several years due to performance degradation, even though my workflow has remained the same for over a decade. Even editing simple text documents has become painfully slow on my 2013 Macbook Pro. M1 gives me a few years breathing space, hopefully, but I'm sure it won't be able to open a 1KB text file instantaneously in 5 years.

remexre 5y ago
Isn't the solution there to use software that puts more emphasis on efficient use of resources? The corollary to Wirth's law is that as time goes on, deleting crap from your machine becomes more and more effective -- I was using Neovim on a Thinkpad T60 at work in 2018, and loving it.
- MagnumOpus 5y ago
  I am using Office 2003 on my home computers and it is snappy and instantaneous. I wish I could use Windows XP with up-to-date hardware support and security updates, too. I remember the days of requiring on 300MHz core, 64MB of ram and 1GB of hard disk for the same functionality that Win10 now provides in a worse way.
  - dmitrygr 5y ago
    Win10LTSB + vmware workstation fullscreen + xp/2000 vm works wonderfully and is very fast!
- ratww 5y ago
  This is one solution. Sometimes I use Sublime Text 3 on my old 2GB MB Air, to code mostly 3D graphics, sometimes backends, some web dev as well. However, on my beefy i9 work laptop I need to use Microsoft Teams and also Docker, which means the fan is on half the time and the computer can barely keep up with the workload. I've seriously considering asking for another computer just to run Teams.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    When I had a contract which required me to use Teams I was exploring installing it on a server and just using VNC to access it. The solution I've settled on however is to just reject contracts where terrible software is mandatory unless there's a significant financial upside.
    - ulzeraj 5y ago
      I do have a Windows 10 PC for crapware which I connect using RDP. RDP on gigabit LAN is fast enough to watch a video with acceptable results. It can also pipe webcam and microphone to the remote host. For Linux hosts NoMachine is really fast and can make use of stuff like x265 streaming. The open source x2go although slower can publish applications terminal services style in a way that the remote app window looks like its running on the local machine.
      - accountofme 5y ago
        Woah NoMachine is still around?! I used to use that to login to home from uni in 2003 (well it was freenx but same diff)
        FpUser 5y ago
        My main tool to login to my Linux workstations. Works like a charm.
      - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
        Huh, is x2go faster than standard x11 forwarding? I played around with forwarding from Linux VMs to my host Mac via XQuartz, and even running on the same machine it was much too slow for e.g. web browsing.
        ulzeraj 5y ago
        I'd say it can be made faster because you can control the streaming quality and compression algorithms.
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  But more and more, good, efficient software is becoming abandonware because most people want the flashy new interface that makes a lot of stuff harder to do, makes nothing easier, takes more resources, but looks better.
  - 542354234235 5y ago
    There isn’t much of anything to directly show the end user the externalized cost of those things, so most people don’t understand it. If there was something akin to gas mileage, it would be much easier to see that you don’t want to install Yukon XL SUV of programs.
jstimpfle 5y ago
You're talking somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but my situation is that I need to use Microsoft Teams. Composing a message, I would say at about 300-500 words with some formatting it starts becoming unusable.
- admissionsguy 5y ago
  I am completely serious, actually. Surprised to see it downvoted. The only underlying assumption is that I'm using default/mainstream tools (macOS, JetBrains IDEs or XCode or Google Docs).
- somedude895 5y ago
  Teams is the bane of my existence. My fully specced 2019 MBP can't handle a Teams call without slowing down the whole system. I have to join calls using Chrome instead. I don't understand how a company like Microsoft can make such terrible software.
  - majewsky 5y ago
    IME, "Turn off incoming video" fixes most of the slowness, and it's fine for me since I don't need a grid of heads anyway.
  - OldHand2018 5y ago
    It’s now well known that in the Malaise Era of Detroit, all corporate executives received their company cars after they had gone through the quality shop to correct all problems. They drove perfectly set up cars that did not have any of the problems experienced by the average consumer. They simply had no idea what it was like. You read complaints on HN all the time that sure make it seem like we have entered a Malaise Era in computing. Us developers surely do not run computers set up like the average consumer, and you can be darn sure that corporate executives at Microsoft and Apple do not get plain vanilla laptops fresh off the production line. The result is entirely predictable.
    - com2kid 5y ago
winter_blue 5y ago
> but I'm sure it won't be able to open a 1KB text file instantaneously in 5 years Unless you decide to switch to a modern console-based text editor. It doesn't have to be vim or emacs. There are many other alternatives. One new such (written-in-Rust) editor being Iota: https://github.com/gchp/iota https://github.com/gchp/iota
- alpaca128 5y ago
  For the rare occasions I open text files outside the terminal I've had good experiences with Textadept. It's open source, lightweight & fast, and can also run in the terminal if needed. Usually I just go for Vim, but sometimes I need something else and in those cases I want to avoid heavyweights like VS Code.
Ieghaehia9 5y ago
I only say this half-seriously, but that's why I sometimes think that part of any performance test should be "try to run your software on a Pentium 4". If it's unusable, go back and optimize some more. But it won't work now, because the whole stack is probably too inefficient.
- psyc 5y ago
  The last time I was heavily into game development, I chose to develop only on a $350 laptop, for exactly that reason. The strategy really does work. The first time I ran it on a gaming machine was after it was done, and it ran like a dream.
  - ludocode 5y ago
    I remember spending days trying to optimize some photo-scanning code in an app I was building and getting seriously frustrated with it. "This should be instantaneous!" Turns out I forgot / didn't notice I was running it under Valgrind the whole time. It was plenty fast once I ran it normally. There's another strategy for you :)
- bbarnett 5y ago
  It'd be neat to have presets in kvm just for this.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  Your point is solid and I had the same philosophy for a while but I think we should draw the line of "minimum supported CPU" a bit further into the future for one simple reason: Ecology. A lot of the older computers were awfully power-inefficient (and also emit a lot of heat). So IMO we should replace "Pentium 4" in your statement with something like "Celeron J4115", or some of the Atom CPUs, maybe?
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Many of those older computers are the first computer of someone around the globe still, at least as long as they keep working.
mrblampo 5y ago
> Even editing simple text documents has become painfully slow on my 2013 Macbook Pro. I just installed Linux Mint on my 2013 MacBook Air, and now it's fast enough that you wouldn't know it's an old computer. Really amazing, it seems like Mac OS in particular is just super resource heavy. I realize Linux pretty much defeats the purpose of owning a Mac, but I'm just glad not to have to throw out an old computer that has seen me through my entire career shift into programming so far.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  Not going to try to convince you of anything, just going to share that I preferred to get rid of my MBP 2015 and buy a fairly decent AMD Ryzen laptop for even less money than I made with the MBP sale. Linux absolutely flies on a Ryzen 4700U with an NVMe SSD. ^_^
comeonseriously 5y ago
Sadly, it isn't about you the user. It's all about "dev productivity".
hsn915 5y ago
I noticed this trend all the way back in 2005. At the time I was excited about upgrading my desktop computer but after a few months I noticed everything performs about the same as before I upgraded the hardware. I concluded that the software must have gotten slower, absorbing all the hardware upgrade.
leephillips 5y ago
Can you explain why “editing simple text documents has become painfully slow on my 2013 Macbook Pro”? Because the process is instantaneous on my 2013 Chromebook Pixel running Linux, or on my even older Thinkpads. I certainly don’t have to replace my computers every few years. Is it a problem with MacOS or the software you’re using?
- michaelcampbell 5y ago
  Yeah, I think I'm going to need extraordinary evidence for that claim (of his, not yours). "painfully slow" to edit text documents seems absurd.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  Possibly he is running an antivirus program or two. Maybe editing files over the network. I know that I've experienced these types of things in a corporate environment and that can lead to slowness where it otherwise would not be.
- cpach 5y ago
  I don’t understand either. Emacs works splendid on my Macbook Air 2013.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    Aye. Or vim (emacs with fewer steps for the uninitiated). Just kidding But yes, command line utilities have never been faster.
    - danaris 5y ago
      Vim is certainly not for the uninitiated, whatever else it may be.
      - randomswede 5y ago
        A better editor than nvi (but, weirdly, not as good a vi as nvi)?
gambiting 5y ago
Yep. I recall couple years ago when Google updated their Gmail interface(wtihout any way to go back of course), Gmail suddenly became unbearably slow on older machines. Laptops which I could easily use for managing my emails were now stupidly slow, because someone somewhere at Google decided that having a slighly nicer interface is worth the extra CPU time. I wonder how much that one single change cost the world in burnt electricity, just to produce some useless features in gmail.
- jamespwilliams 5y ago
  Gmail does have a "Basic HTML" mode, FWIW.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    And it's a step below the interface they had not that long ago, which was fine and which worked on literally any machine very very fast. The "basic HTML" mode is well....extremely basic. That's the interface I have in mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBI2liYIvdY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBI2liYIvdY I don't feel like the current 2021 interface offers any advantages over it, and yet it uses far more resources to load and open things smoothly.
- nwallin 5y ago
  You can access gmail via IMAP/SMTP. Any desktop e-mail client will be significantly lighter and faster than any browser based webmail client. And I don't care how shitty your computer is, mutt will run snappily on it. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229
deepdmistry 5y ago
Not sure what you have running in the background or where specifically you are editing text, i have a 2013 MacBook air and i can run intellij. Let alone simple text editor.
flenserboy 5y ago
I've been seriously thinking of buying old software off eBay and running it in a VM just to have capable (if archaic) applications to hand that aren't filled with cruft. I'm also very glad for some of the terminal-based solutions I've found to substitute for bogged-down GUI applications, even when they bring their own set of usability issues with them.
merpnderp 5y ago
You don't need to edit that text document in Visual Studio's bloated Frankenstein of an IDE. VIM is still there waiting for you to come back - it misses you.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
Do we have to do this in every thread? This argument is as boring as the systemd/init argument.
jsight 5y ago
IDK, I have a ten year old laptop that still does pretty well at those things. Its biggest issue is its terrible IO and slow HD, but those were its biggest issues when new too.
driverdan 5y ago
If this is actually true the problem is on your end. I'm still using the first retina MBP from 2012. I keep all of my software up-to-date and it has no performance issues. I do keep it back a few MacOS versions because I see no need to update past the one that's on it.
ksec 5y ago
Especially true when you consider the biggest bottleneck was I/O, and the best SSD are in some cases 100 to 1000 times faster than HDD. You can have 8 - 16 times as much CPU core. Your single CPU Core is at least 2 times faster compared to 2010. And yet somehow opening a text file is as slow if not slower.
reedjosh 5y ago
https://suckless.org/ https://suckless.org/ I've been happily using non bloated tools for years now. Obviously this isn't for everyone. ;)
dweekly 5y ago
Yes. Whenever I accidentally open a .JSON file in Finder and thus launch XCode (instead of opening it in VScode), my 2.4Ghz 8-core 32GB RAM 2019 MacBook Pro Retina screeches to a halt for ~30 seconds. To display a text file. sigh
swiley 5y ago
People say my OS looks old because it's always cwm/fvwm full of xterms with vim or emacs but I'm comfortable on 10 year old budget computers because I reflexively avoid anything shiny looking.
MonaroVXR 5y ago
I might get shot, but I don't believe this, since I'm using a 2013 ASUS such feels snappy to do all my webdev on it and host a couple of virtualmachines.

remexre 5y ago

Isn't the solution there to use software that puts more emphasis on efficient use of resources? The corollary to Wirth's law is that as time goes on, deleting crap from your machine becomes more and more effective -- I was using Neovim on a Thinkpad T60 at work in 2018, and loving it.

MagnumOpus 5y ago
I am using Office 2003 on my home computers and it is snappy and instantaneous. I wish I could use Windows XP with up-to-date hardware support and security updates, too. I remember the days of requiring on 300MHz core, 64MB of ram and 1GB of hard disk for the same functionality that Win10 now provides in a worse way.
- dmitrygr 5y ago
  Win10LTSB + vmware workstation fullscreen + xp/2000 vm works wonderfully and is very fast!
ratww 5y ago
This is one solution. Sometimes I use Sublime Text 3 on my old 2GB MB Air, to code mostly 3D graphics, sometimes backends, some web dev as well. However, on my beefy i9 work laptop I need to use Microsoft Teams and also Docker, which means the fan is on half the time and the computer can barely keep up with the workload. I've seriously considering asking for another computer just to run Teams.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  When I had a contract which required me to use Teams I was exploring installing it on a server and just using VNC to access it. The solution I've settled on however is to just reject contracts where terrible software is mandatory unless there's a significant financial upside.
  - ulzeraj 5y ago
    I do have a Windows 10 PC for crapware which I connect using RDP. RDP on gigabit LAN is fast enough to watch a video with acceptable results. It can also pipe webcam and microphone to the remote host. For Linux hosts NoMachine is really fast and can make use of stuff like x265 streaming. The open source x2go although slower can publish applications terminal services style in a way that the remote app window looks like its running on the local machine.
    - accountofme 5y ago
      Woah NoMachine is still around?! I used to use that to login to home from uni in 2003 (well it was freenx but same diff)
      - FpUser 5y ago
        My main tool to login to my Linux workstations. Works like a charm.
    - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      Huh, is x2go faster than standard x11 forwarding? I played around with forwarding from Linux VMs to my host Mac via XQuartz, and even running on the same machine it was much too slow for e.g. web browsing.
      - ulzeraj 5y ago
        I'd say it can be made faster because you can control the streaming quality and compression algorithms.
jfrunyon 5y ago
But more and more, good, efficient software is becoming abandonware because most people want the flashy new interface that makes a lot of stuff harder to do, makes nothing easier, takes more resources, but looks better.
- 542354234235 5y ago
  There isn’t much of anything to directly show the end user the externalized cost of those things, so most people don’t understand it. If there was something akin to gas mileage, it would be much easier to see that you don’t want to install Yukon XL SUV of programs.

jstimpfle 5y ago

You're talking somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but my situation is that I need to use Microsoft Teams. Composing a message, I would say at about 300-500 words with some formatting it starts becoming unusable.

admissionsguy 5y ago
I am completely serious, actually. Surprised to see it downvoted. The only underlying assumption is that I'm using default/mainstream tools (macOS, JetBrains IDEs or XCode or Google Docs).
somedude895 5y ago
Teams is the bane of my existence. My fully specced 2019 MBP can't handle a Teams call without slowing down the whole system. I have to join calls using Chrome instead. I don't understand how a company like Microsoft can make such terrible software.
- majewsky 5y ago
  IME, "Turn off incoming video" fixes most of the slowness, and it's fine for me since I don't need a grid of heads anyway.
- OldHand2018 5y ago
  It’s now well known that in the Malaise Era of Detroit, all corporate executives received their company cars after they had gone through the quality shop to correct all problems. They drove perfectly set up cars that did not have any of the problems experienced by the average consumer. They simply had no idea what it was like. You read complaints on HN all the time that sure make it seem like we have entered a Malaise Era in computing. Us developers surely do not run computers set up like the average consumer, and you can be darn sure that corporate executives at Microsoft and Apple do not get plain vanilla laptops fresh off the production line. The result is entirely predictable.
  - com2kid 5y ago

winter_blue 5y ago

> but I'm sure it won't be able to open a 1KB text file instantaneously in 5 years Unless you decide to switch to a modern console-based text editor. It doesn't have to be vim or emacs. There are many other alternatives. One new such (written-in-Rust) editor being Iota: https://github.com/gchp/iota https://github.com/gchp/iota

alpaca128 5y ago
For the rare occasions I open text files outside the terminal I've had good experiences with Textadept. It's open source, lightweight & fast, and can also run in the terminal if needed. Usually I just go for Vim, but sometimes I need something else and in those cases I want to avoid heavyweights like VS Code.

Ieghaehia9 5y ago

I only say this half-seriously, but that's why I sometimes think that part of any performance test should be "try to run your software on a Pentium 4". If it's unusable, go back and optimize some more. But it won't work now, because the whole stack is probably too inefficient.

psyc 5y ago
The last time I was heavily into game development, I chose to develop only on a $350 laptop, for exactly that reason. The strategy really does work. The first time I ran it on a gaming machine was after it was done, and it ran like a dream.
- ludocode 5y ago
  I remember spending days trying to optimize some photo-scanning code in an app I was building and getting seriously frustrated with it. "This should be instantaneous!" Turns out I forgot / didn't notice I was running it under Valgrind the whole time. It was plenty fast once I ran it normally. There's another strategy for you :)
bbarnett 5y ago
It'd be neat to have presets in kvm just for this.
pdimitar 5y ago
Your point is solid and I had the same philosophy for a while but I think we should draw the line of "minimum supported CPU" a bit further into the future for one simple reason: Ecology. A lot of the older computers were awfully power-inefficient (and also emit a lot of heat). So IMO we should replace "Pentium 4" in your statement with something like "Celeron J4115", or some of the Atom CPUs, maybe?
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Many of those older computers are the first computer of someone around the globe still, at least as long as they keep working.

mrblampo 5y ago

> Even editing simple text documents has become painfully slow on my 2013 Macbook Pro. I just installed Linux Mint on my 2013 MacBook Air, and now it's fast enough that you wouldn't know it's an old computer. Really amazing, it seems like Mac OS in particular is just super resource heavy. I realize Linux pretty much defeats the purpose of owning a Mac, but I'm just glad not to have to throw out an old computer that has seen me through my entire career shift into programming so far.

pdimitar 5y ago
Not going to try to convince you of anything, just going to share that I preferred to get rid of my MBP 2015 and buy a fairly decent AMD Ryzen laptop for even less money than I made with the MBP sale. Linux absolutely flies on a Ryzen 4700U with an NVMe SSD. ^_^

comeonseriously 5y ago

Sadly, it isn't about you the user. It's all about "dev productivity".

hsn915 5y ago

I noticed this trend all the way back in 2005. At the time I was excited about upgrading my desktop computer but after a few months I noticed everything performs about the same as before I upgraded the hardware. I concluded that the software must have gotten slower, absorbing all the hardware upgrade.

leephillips 5y ago

Can you explain why “editing simple text documents has become painfully slow on my 2013 Macbook Pro”? Because the process is instantaneous on my 2013 Chromebook Pixel running Linux, or on my even older Thinkpads. I certainly don’t have to replace my computers every few years. Is it a problem with MacOS or the software you’re using?

michaelcampbell 5y ago
Yeah, I think I'm going to need extraordinary evidence for that claim (of his, not yours). "painfully slow" to edit text documents seems absurd.
asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
Possibly he is running an antivirus program or two. Maybe editing files over the network. I know that I've experienced these types of things in a corporate environment and that can lead to slowness where it otherwise would not be.
cpach 5y ago
I don’t understand either. Emacs works splendid on my Macbook Air 2013.
- tomrod 5y ago
  Aye. Or vim (emacs with fewer steps for the uninitiated). Just kidding But yes, command line utilities have never been faster.
  - danaris 5y ago
    Vim is certainly not for the uninitiated, whatever else it may be.
    - randomswede 5y ago
      A better editor than nvi (but, weirdly, not as good a vi as nvi)?

gambiting 5y ago

Yep. I recall couple years ago when Google updated their Gmail interface(wtihout any way to go back of course), Gmail suddenly became unbearably slow on older machines. Laptops which I could easily use for managing my emails were now stupidly slow, because someone somewhere at Google decided that having a slighly nicer interface is worth the extra CPU time. I wonder how much that one single change cost the world in burnt electricity, just to produce some useless features in gmail.

jamespwilliams 5y ago
Gmail does have a "Basic HTML" mode, FWIW.
- gambiting 5y ago
  And it's a step below the interface they had not that long ago, which was fine and which worked on literally any machine very very fast. The "basic HTML" mode is well....extremely basic. That's the interface I have in mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBI2liYIvdY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBI2liYIvdY I don't feel like the current 2021 interface offers any advantages over it, and yet it uses far more resources to load and open things smoothly.
nwallin 5y ago
You can access gmail via IMAP/SMTP. Any desktop e-mail client will be significantly lighter and faster than any browser based webmail client. And I don't care how shitty your computer is, mutt will run snappily on it. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229

deepdmistry 5y ago

Not sure what you have running in the background or where specifically you are editing text, i have a 2013 MacBook air and i can run intellij. Let alone simple text editor.

flenserboy 5y ago

I've been seriously thinking of buying old software off eBay and running it in a VM just to have capable (if archaic) applications to hand that aren't filled with cruft. I'm also very glad for some of the terminal-based solutions I've found to substitute for bogged-down GUI applications, even when they bring their own set of usability issues with them.

merpnderp 5y ago

You don't need to edit that text document in Visual Studio's bloated Frankenstein of an IDE. VIM is still there waiting for you to come back - it misses you.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

Do we have to do this in every thread? This argument is as boring as the systemd/init argument.

jsight 5y ago

IDK, I have a ten year old laptop that still does pretty well at those things. Its biggest issue is its terrible IO and slow HD, but those were its biggest issues when new too.

driverdan 5y ago

If this is actually true the problem is on your end. I'm still using the first retina MBP from 2012. I keep all of my software up-to-date and it has no performance issues. I do keep it back a few MacOS versions because I see no need to update past the one that's on it.

ksec 5y ago

Especially true when you consider the biggest bottleneck was I/O, and the best SSD are in some cases 100 to 1000 times faster than HDD. You can have 8 - 16 times as much CPU core. Your single CPU Core is at least 2 times faster compared to 2010. And yet somehow opening a text file is as slow if not slower.

reedjosh 5y ago

https://suckless.org/ https://suckless.org/ I've been happily using non bloated tools for years now. Obviously this isn't for everyone. ;)

dweekly 5y ago

Yes. Whenever I accidentally open a .JSON file in Finder and thus launch XCode (instead of opening it in VScode), my 2.4Ghz 8-core 32GB RAM 2019 MacBook Pro Retina screeches to a halt for ~30 seconds. To display a text file. sigh

swiley 5y ago

People say my OS looks old because it's always cwm/fvwm full of xterms with vim or emacs but I'm comfortable on 10 year old budget computers because I reflexively avoid anything shiny looking.

MonaroVXR 5y ago

I might get shot, but I don't believe this, since I'm using a 2013 ASUS such feels snappy to do all my webdev on it and host a couple of virtualmachines.