I agree with you on SSDs, that was the last upgrade that felt like flipping the “modern computer” switch overnight. Everything since has been incremental unless you’re doing ML or high-end gaming.

▲ asenna 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I know it's not the same. But I think a lot of people had a similar feeling going from Intel-Macbooks to Apple Silicon. An insane upgrade that I still can't believe.

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crazygringo 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This. My M1 MacBook felt like a similarly shocking upgrade -- probably not quite as much as my first SSD did, but still the only other time when I've thought, "holy sh*t, this is a whole different thing".

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wongarsu 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The M1 was great. But the jump felt particularly great because Intel Macbooks had fallen behind in performance per dollar. Great build quality, great trackpad, but if you were after performance they were not exactly the best thing to get

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skylurk 3 hours ago | parent [-]

For as long as I can remember, before M1, Macs were always behind in the CPU department. PC's had much better value if you cared about CPU performance.

After the M1, my casual home laptop started outperforming my top-spec work laptops.

	▲	kergonath an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> For as long as I can remember, before M1, Macs were always behind in the CPU department. PC's had much better value if you cared about CPU performance. But not if you cared about battery life, because that was the tradeoff Apple was making. Which worked great until about 2015-2016. The parts they were using were not Intel’s priority and it went south basically after Broadwell, IIRC. I also suppose that Apple stopped investing heavily into a dead-end platform while they were working on the M1 generation some time before it was announced.

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redwall_hp 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I usually use an M2 Mac at work, and haven't really touched Windows since 2008. Recently I had to get an additional Windows laptop (Lenovo P series) for a project my team is working on, and it is such a piece of shit. It's unfathomable that people are tolerating Windows or Intel (and then still have the gall to talk shit about Macs).

It's like time travelling back to 2004. Slow, loud fans, random brief freezes of the whole system, a shell that still feels like a toy, a proprietary 170W power supply and mediocre battery life, subpar display. The keyboard is okay, at least. What a joke.

Meanwhile, my personal M3 Max system can render Da Vinci timelines with complex Fusion compositions in real time and handle whole stacks of VSTs in a DAW. Compared to the Lenovo choking on an IDE.

	▲	ponector an hour ago \| parent [-]
		There will be not so big difference if you compare laptops in the same price brackets. Cheap PCs are crap.

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bigyabai 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's a lot more believable if you tried some of the other Wintel machines at the time. Those Macbook chassis were the hottest of the bunch, it's no surprise the Macbook Pro was among the first to be redesigned.

▲ simlevesque 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've had this with gen5 PCIe SSDs recently. My T710 is so fast it's hard to believe. But you need to have a lot of data to make it worth.

Example:

    > time du -sh .
    737G .
    ________________________
    Executed in   24.63 secs

And on my laptop that has a gen3, lower spec NVMe:

    > time du -sh .
    304G .
    ________________________
    Executed in   80.86 secs

It's almost 10 times faster. The CPU must have something to do with it too but they're both Ryzen 9.

▲ adgjlsfhk1 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

To me that reads 3x, not "almost 10x". The main differrence here is probably power. A desktop/server is happy to send 15W to the SSD and hundreds of watts to the CPU, while a laptop wants the SSD running in the ~1 watt range and the CPU in the 10s of watts range.

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simlevesque 5 hours ago | parent [-]

There's over twice as much content in the first test. It's around 3.8gb/s vs 30gb/s if you divide both folder size and both du durations. That makes it 7.9 times faster and I'm comfortable calling this "almost 10 times".

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ls65536 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The total size isn't what matters in this case but rather the total number of files/directories that need to be traversed (and their file sizes summed).

	▲	simlevesque 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I responded here, it's essentially the same content: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46150030

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adgjlsfhk1 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

oops. I missed the size diff. that's a solid 8x. that's cool!

▲ taneliv 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I believe you, but your benchmark is not very useful. I get this on two 5400rpm 3T HDDs in a mirror:

    $ time du -sh .
    935G    .
                                                                                                                          
    real    0m1.154s

Simply because there's less than 20 directories and the files are large.

	▲	simlevesque 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I should have been more clear: It's my http cache for my crawling jobs. Lots of files in many shapes. My new setup: gen5 ssd in desktop: `> time find . -type f \| wc -l 5645741 ________________________ Executed in 4.77 secs` My old setup, gen3 ssd in laptop: `> time find . -type f \| wc -l 2944648 ________________________ Executed in 27.53 secs` Both are running pretty much non-stop, very slowly.

▲ jug 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I thought so too on my mini PC. Then I got myself my current Mac mini M4 and I have to give it to Apple, or maybe in part to ARM... It was like another SSD moment. It's still not spun up the fan and run literally lukewarm at most my office, coding and photo work.

▲ pstadler 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This and high resolution displays, for me at least.

▲ wdfx 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The only time I had this other than changing to SSD was when I got my first multi-core system, a Q6600 (confusingly labeled a Core 2 Quad). Had a great time with that machine.

	▲	genewitch 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"Core" was/is like "PowerPC" or "Ryzen", just a name. Intel Core i9, for instance, as opposed to Intel Pentium D, both x86_x64, different chip features.