You switched to Mac at the same time as Moore's law was winding down, heck, my 2010 Thinkpad T410 with W10 is my everyday machine.

Just a pet peeve, Moore's law isn't tied to performance, it's tied to transistor count. Also, it has been pronounced dead every year for a very long time, but it hasn't actually been dead until the last few years, and some people might even argue that it's still not dead. Your comment is still completely relevant though, since performance increases affecting average users began to slow around then

That was true in the late 90s. It's not really true anymore.

I built a Windows PC using parts from MicroCenter back in 2014. Core i5-4690K, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, GTX 970 running Windows 8. It was around $1400 USD at that time, if I remember correctly.

It's now 2018. That same PC with all it's original hardware, is now running Windows 10 just as quickly as always. Not only is the performance still great, but my 4-year-old mid-range PC still outperforms many brand new PCs today. (It's still slightly faster than the current 21in 4K i5 iMac, for example).

If you had bought a Windows machine in 2012, it would not have "slowed down" the way your 90's computers did, and could still use it at it's full original performance today (just like your Mac).

Indeed. I've been using home-built PCs since the 1990s, more than a dozen in total, each with lifespans of 4 or more years (many overlapping with one another in periods of usage). Most using some flavor of Windows NT starting with NT 3.5.

In all that time, I've never experienced a computer getting slower during its usage lifetime. It's a story I have read and heard from others, but I don't know if it's real but caused by some usage behavior I don't exhibit or imagined.

I do know that in the 1990s and even more recently, but to a lesser extent, when I examined other peoples' Windows computers I would find they had installed legions of third-rate applications that were on the precipice of being malware. And this was a cascading problem because people would install something harmful to their PC such as iTunes, Quicktime, or RealPlayer and then attempt to resolve the resulting performance problem by installing a snake-oil system-tuner which in turn made matters even worse. Or they would install an anti-virus tool and their system would slow to a crawl. Unraveling all of this was never fun.

My decades of experience with Windows is that if you simply avoid harmful software, performance will remain essentially uniform. The systems do not decay by some natural process as many popular stories imply.

I don't know if I can agree with you on this. In ~2016 I built a PC (i7, 24GB RAM, 1.5TB ssd, gtx 1080) and my 2014 17 inch mbp has slowly been closing the gap. This is probably more due to software optimizations than hardware, but things just open and close more smoothly and quickly these days on the laptop.

I think the real issue is that Windows hasn't been effectively utilizing the RAM I've given it.

I've found that windows benefits from being reinstalled every once in a while. Try a fresh install of Windows 10, and see where that gets you?

I suspect you are right, but I really, really, don't want to take the time to do that.

Windows 10 has a nice feature to "refresh" which supposedly re-installs Windows while keeping programs and settings. I haven't tried it, so no idea how well it works, but it might be worth your time

IMO, that's more to do with Intel than to do with Microsoft and Apple. Sandy Bridge, released in 2011, was the last Intel processor that was more than 10% faster than previous generations. We used to see ~25% generational speedups from Intel. Since 2011 we've only seen 5-10% speedups.

People talk about the downsides of this. But it does mean all the tech you buy today is going to be useable in 10ys. That's quite a win.

Capitalism hates it though if there's no reason to sell new devices. Although I think we still have a lot of headroom in terms of memory performance that will matter just as much as the previous CPU performance increases.

> Capitalism hates it though if there's no reason to sell new devices.

"Capitalism" (the free market) is us. And I for one do "hate" that CPU performance is not increasing as rapidly as it did in the past. I would very much like to see a return of significant generational performance improvements. I would happily upgrade my PC more often if it resulted in the significant gains of yesteryear.

I find it a curious asceticism to cherish stagnant technology because it means my 5-year old PC is still relevant. Yeah, that's the silver lining. But let's be real: if you had a PC that was twice as fast in every performance dimension that I could afford today, I would buy it.

Only the companies that sell the devices hate it. For every other entity it is a win as more money will be available to be spent on something else.

Companies that get a competitive advantage or can command a premium from selling long lived products don't hate it at all. It's the core of their business model.

If the longevity of a product is a selling point, can provide a competitive advantage or help capture a premium then Capitalism is absolutely fine with it.

The future is heterogeneous computing. Intel's chips already include a GPU, the next step will be FPGAs.

I can see it now: "Facebook now offers faster news feed rendering for PCs equipped with Intel 10 series FPGAs!"

Kidding of course, but I think the FPGA/CPU combos will be more relevant to servers than end users, at least initially. FPGA high level synthesis is miles away from being useful for consumer level application acceleration, and GPUs are much more accessible

Well, when I was using Windows more than 10 years ago... formatting your computer every 2 years was a good way to maintain performance, otherwise it would just slow down due to disk fragmentation + crapware accumulation. On Linux I could also just install the OS once and use it until I upgraded the machine... like in 6 years.

When I was using Linux more than 10 years ago I didn't even format my disks when upgrading my machine, I just moved the boot drive from the old machine to the new one.

OTOH, I've reformatted my 2012 Linux machine twice since I purchased it, which is twice more than I've formatted my Windows machine over the same period. Granted my Linux box is much more heavily used, but...

Sounds like you must be using Ubuntu :P

Got it in one.

Yep - in the long run it has been much cheaper for me as well. I moved full time to Mac in late 2008 with an aluminum Macbook, and used that Macbook daily until May of 2015 when I picked up a loaded Macbook Pro 15. I got almost 7 years out of that first aluminum Macbook (which I actually still use to serve media to my Apple TV), and I bet I get that (or more) out of my Macbook Pro. Previous to 2008 I was getting a new Windows laptop pretty much every other year as I always encountered the same slowdown as you describe. I think that Windows laptops get better than 2 year now due to decreases in overall CPU speed improvements relative to what we were seeing between 2000 -> 2010, but the build quality of the Macbook was something no one else could touch at the time.

I have a 2012 Windows laptop which is still going strong.

I think the performance improvements have drastically changed due to the adoption of SSDs in Apple's line up. The Macbook Pros in the early 2012 started to incorporate them around that time. Windows laptops took awhile to catch up starting with 'ultrabooks'

Which makes it baffling why they still have spinning disks in their Mac lineup.

My personal laptop now with Windows 10 Pro, was bought in 2009 just as Windows 7 was barely new.

Still going strong.