And launching MacWrite in 10 seconds was the best case imaginable. Software like MS Word or Netscape Communicator took several minutes to launch on consumer Mac hardware through the 1990s. The early versions of OS X completely exhausted lower-end G3/G4 hardware -- Everything beachballed for at least few seconds, and not even TextEdit launched instantly. There's a reason that every Mac/Windows app had those "Are you sure you want to Quit?" dialogs ... Quitting was very very expensive if you didn't mean it.

Launching small apps like TextEdit didn't really become "effortless" until the Intel era, which really didn't start that long ago.