The first Mac I did serious work on was a 450 Mhz Blue and White PowerMac G3. It was a few years old when I started laying out pages and mixing audio on it, but with OS 9 and 512 MB of RAM it was by no means a slouch. Even so, it wasn’t able to do much more than one intensive thing at a time. The computer’s limitations necessitated doing one thing at a time — the hardware just couldn’t cut it.
After about 18 months, I upgraded to a 1 GHz Titanium PowerBook G4 with 1GB of RAM. I was blown away by the sheer power of the thing. Everything was faster, even in the then-current OS X 10.2, which was rough around the edges. When booted into OS 9 (that model was the last Apple notebook with that ability), the machine flew.
The extra horsepower made a huge difference in my workflow. I could be answering emails while Adobe Premiere (I know, I know…) flattened mixes into MP3 files. Importing photos into QuarkXPress was instant. OS X booted quickly. Everything was different due to the speed increase.
I could be more productive because my computer was faster.
Apple’s move from the G3 to the G4 processor was perhaps the company’s last great processor migration. It was a mind-blowing change for even normal users. Even moving from high-end G4s and G5s to Intel’s CoreDuo chips didn’t bring the radical horsepower increase the G4 brought.
The clearest example for me is the iMac G4. Starting at a meager 700 Mhz with the initial model, it was on a totally different playing field from it’s G3-powered ancestor. However, the last model — clocking in at 1.25 Ghz — made the early models feel archaic in comparison. The iMac G5, while faster on paper, didn’t feel much faster in everyday tasks.
Likewise, current iMacs — powered by Intel’s Core i3, i5 and i7 processors — aren’t radically faster in everyday usage than my 2.93 Ghz Core2Duo iMac.
Yes, the new machines can rip DVDs faster than my current rig. Yes, they can export footage from Final Cut faster, but the wait time on those tasks is so much shorter than it was just a few years ago, does it even matter anymore?
For the majority of computer users, waiting has become a thing of the past. Most people will never come close to maxing out a modern computer. With the high-end pro users as the exception, no one needs all of the power they have on the other side of their keyboards and mice. Opening files and applications is fast on any modern machine. The Internet isn’t going to load much faster with more RAM installed.
(Raw power aside, feature-based upgrades have slowed down. Today’s iMac looks and works pretty much like an iMac from 2007. The industry has moved to incremental updates as the evolution of technology has slowed down. Apple isn’t alone — just look at what Dell is selling today and look at what they were selling 4 years ago.)
The future — at this point — looks pretty boring. SSDs don’t offer enough of a performance increase to justify the additional cost yet. Yes, Snow Leopard’s Grand Central Dispatch is very cool, but even low-level programming changes like it don’t mean much in everyday life. As companies and consumers shift from the desktop to mobile devices, the slowing down of computer evolution will continue. It’s a cycle, and the loser is the personal computer.
In short, upgrading to a new computer used to be exciting. Today, it doesn’t bring the radical change it once did.
And that makes me a little sad.