> I don't remember the norm being "desktop apps which started in an instant 20 years ago".
What keeps happening is-- we get an upgrade, and then have some old applications, and they become "instant" in comparison to our experience with both newer stuff and the application in the past. Then we watch that win clawed away from us.
Of course, it was never instant, even with the old or newer hardware.
My brother spoke a few weeks ago of being awestruck and programs starting "instantly" when he got a hard disk on DOS on the XT. But now I have a better-than-XT-equivalent (9.54MHz V20) with a very fast IO subsystem and I can tell you that it is very much not actually instant.
My take is that launch times are on average better but still not great. And I think that's because something else that's constant is that programs first get written for the convenience of the programmer, and then optimized until people stop complaining about the speed.
The waste of resources bothers me too, of course. But on the other hand, computing resources have become radically cheaper while programmer time has gotten much more expensive. While at the same time, writing software had gotten radically more complex. So I suspect me getting bothered here is sort of like when my grandmother, who grew up in the Great Depression, got bothered when I didn't wash and reuse aluminum foil.