Oh, 10.6 was so nice, my MBP came with it, it flew, it was fast on 4 GB of ram! Now, the latest MacOS is slow on 16GB of ram, it's the same machine and I still do the same things with it. I don't understand "progress".

For comparison, Windows 2000 has a recommended minimum requirement of 64MB of ram. Windows 95 recommended 8MB. That's the scale of bloat we're talking about. That a modern UI which does essentially the same things can feel unresponsive in any way on several orders of magnitude more resources says a lot about the priorities of modern software developers.

Windows 95 to Windows 2000 is not a fair comparison, but Windows NT 4.0 is - which required 16MB and recommended 32MB.

I don’t think they were comparing 2000 to 95, but both if them to modern OSs (in some sense 8MB vs 64MB is such a small difference compared to modern OSs which basically need 8GB minimum)

The more computing resources we make available, the more wasteful we become: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

my favorite MS anecdote: PC Magazine gave a beta 2k install on a CD. I tried it, and it was such an improvement over 98 that I never installed anything else until XP was a ~requirement (mostly a convenience because it embedded more and more recent drivers)

To be frank, that's because the Win 9x line was intentionally designed around the older, less-stable MS-DOS architecture. NT, which is what 2000 was based on, was around for seven years by that point and was remarkably stable. The big problem is that it was compatible with virtually nothing, and it wasn't until Win XP that the business world aligned itself with NT.

It wasn't until XP that the _consumer_ world aligned itself with NT. NT 4 & 2000 were unavoidable in business networks with windows domains

NT was more compatible with my hardware than 98 :)

Unless you wanted USB support.

> I never installed anything else until XP was a ~requirement

Likewise. I only migrated to WXP because AoE3 required it… and it turned out to be terrible but there was no real way to downgrade.

same, not AoE3 but I remember that I didn't want XP but something required it...