On my old Atari ST, which I still use, the busy bee comes on the screen only when the machine is doing useful work for me, that I have explicitly asked it to do. If it's not busy, the machine is always responsive. On OSX, the beach ball appears at random seemingly, when doing something as trivial as scrolling a document (or web page), or clicking on the menubar at the top of the screen! And the machine is useless until it finishes whatever it's doing.
The ST has 1 8Mhz processor and 1M RAM and a floppy drive. The Mac has 4x3Ghz cores and 8G of RAM, HD not SSD like that's an excuse. And remember we are talking about simple GUI updating tasks here. There is simply no getting around that the interactive parts of OSX are appallingly badly written. Processing a mouse click and drawing a menu, for crying out loud!
I am amazed at how these modern day machines just don't seem that powerful when you use them. I remember using my Pentium 166 with I think 4MB of RAM, and sometimes I feel it was more responsive than my current Windows box or Mac with tons of RAM. Maybe it's just nostalgia talkin'.
It's not nostalgia. It's the software industry; and Apple. If they do not keep writing needless code and mindlessly adding features and then _forcing_ you to use their software (you are not given a choice; hello Apple), they become less important. The focus then (properly) becomes Moore's Law.
And your machine gets more and more powerful. That comes from the hardware. Software does not add more power. It drains power.
But you will not likely see much of the gains from Moore's Law as a home user; you only see "new" software. The software industry will be the ones who get the benefit of hardware advances. They will promptly usurp all the gains for themselves to make their bloated software capable of running. Writing power hungry programs is perfectly acceptable (I love writing code) BUT _forcing_ people to use it is not cool. Users are not often given a choice to keep using "yesterday's" software (even if it still works). Even if it would let them see the gains from Moore's Law. That is a travesty. Keep staring at the beachball. Life is good.
We've had decades to observe software development and it's clear that software does not have an equivalent to Moore's Law.
Let us buy the Apple hardware without the Apple software. Let us install our own software if we so choose. Now, behold as people try to argue against this. But they are only arguing against options and choice. What is the harm in giving people the option to install their own OS? If anything without the Apple brand is so terrible then surely no one would opt for it. So no harm done. You never know, they might actually be able to sell lots of hardware this way. "Average consumers" are not the only ones who spend lots of money on hardware.
Apple has taken a decent system (free UNIX) and ruined it. They have made it unusuable for anyone who has any idea of how fast computers SHOULD be.
Yes, the industry would like you to upgrade every year, if they could. They've managed to force most people into perhaps a 3 year cycle. But the truth is, for tasks like documents of a few pages, small spreadsheets, sending a receiving email, etc, etc, then a machine from 1990 could do all that.
Imagine if the car industry worked like this, if 3 years after you bought a car it wouldn't work quite right with the only fuel you could buy, and spare parts were impossible to obtain, and the engine compartment was welded shut!
I definitely see this myself. When waiting for my Linux box to respond to a mouse movement or my Windows laptop to wake back up, I think back to my Apple ][ where it was never possible to enter data faster than the computer can handle it.
Right now there are 257 tasks running on my Ubuntu box. I don't recognize half of them.
I'm not sure who "we" is anymore. Smart people like yourself would not do many of the things we're seeing done. I think it's within your power to control the slippage at least starting with you. Again, the word is "tolerance". When will you say "Enough. No mas."?
If you need one, I'm happy to send you a UNIX (or simple instructions on how to build one) that does not have the complexity of Ubuntu but runs just as fast and does all the same stuff, sans the gratuitous GUI's. You can always add GUI layers later if you want them. My guess is you won't once you see how much faster things are, and how few processes you need to be running at any given time.
The ST has 1 8Mhz processor and 1M RAM and a floppy drive. The Mac has 4x3Ghz cores and 8G of RAM, HD not SSD like that's an excuse. And remember we are talking about simple GUI updating tasks here. There is simply no getting around that the interactive parts of OSX are appallingly badly written. Processing a mouse click and drawing a menu, for crying out loud!