[Julio] He has an old computer sitting on a desk, and recorded a quick video with it showing how quickly this computer can do seemingly simple things, like open default Windows applications including Command Prompt and Notepad. Compared to its modern laptop, which seems to struggle with even these basic tasks despite its impressively modern hardware, the antique machine feels like a speed demon. His videos have sparked a lot of discussion About why modern PCs are often slower than machines of the past.
After going through several plausible scenarios of what causes the slowdown, [Julio] He seems to settle on a fine point regarding abstraction. A lot of application developers try to reduce the amount of development time for their software while maximizing the number of platforms it runs on, which often involves using a compatibility layer, which strips the software away from the hardware and increases the overhead needed to run the software. Things like this are possible thanks to the amount of computing power modern machines have, but not without the slight cost of increased latency. For natively developed applications, response times are expected to be very good, but fewer applications are now being developed natively including things that might look like they would otherwise. Notepad, for example, is now based on UWP.
While there are plenty of plausible reasons for this apparent slowdown in speed, it is likely to be a combination of several things; Death A Thousand Cuts. Desktop applications built using the browser compatibility layer, software companies undercutting their costs perhaps by not adhering to programming best practices or simply taking advantage of modern computing power to reduce their costs, and of course the fact that modern software often needs more hardware resources to run safely and securely. than their counterparts from the past.
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