Comparing 100 seconds to 1 seconds makes things look huge (well they are if you really would have to wait that long). But comparing 0.1s to 0.001 or 0.01s is alot less noticeable even though the percentage difference is the same.
We just have to wait until the next iteration of "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away" and all the current SSDs would feel like super slow drives.
My impression is that Microsoft has been falling down on the job for some time. in the '90s and aughts a computer felt slow after three years, and was nigh unusable after five, even for just word processing and web browsing.
These days? the almost new MacBook I'm typing this on only comes with 8gb ram; that was a decent (but not great) loadout in 2011. And my thinkpad? the other laptop I use? It is from 2011, also has 8gb ram, and runs just fine. As far as I can tell, the big difference between my ancient laptop and my new one is that my new one is way thinner (and has a keyboard that is dramatically more vulnerable to foreign matter)
I mean, I do own an occulus rift, and it does very much require a modern computer to run, but as far as I can tell, that's pretty niche. Hardware requirements just aren't going up the way they used to.
