osx is easier to use than mac.. whatever they named their old versions.
It goes on and on. I can have 50 browser tabs open at the same time, each one hosting a highly complicated app, ranging from media playback to chat rooms to custom statistical calculators. I don't need to install anything for any of these apps, I just type in a short string in my url bar. And they all just work, at the same time.
I have to keep buying a new computer every few years because software keeps getting slower. That machine still costs a thousand dollars, and my "low-end" internet connection now costs $100. My hypertext document viewer requires at least 8GB of RAM for normal use, with eight CPU cores. No new network protocol can exist without being tunneled over the hypertext document viewer's stateless application-layer network protocol. All of this so that I can click on a screen to read some text.
The supercomputers in our pockets (that used to be telephones, but don't work well for that anymore) will let us run the programs that one of two companies allow us to run, which will run most apps... as long as the hardware is as recent as our laptops/desktops.
Yes, we're very advanced. In the past 20 years, we have achieved... the same thing we had 20 years ago... only with more hardware requirements, programming languages, and frameworks. Today you can do anything... as long as it's on a web page, on recent hardware (and God help you if you haven't updated your software in the past month)
Has there ever been a time, going back to the 70s with original PCs, where new software didn't necessitate a new computer?
Things are also getting better now that Intel is dying. I mean, the new Apple silicon chips are astoundingly fast and energy efficient, an M1 from 5 years ago is still going strong and probably won't truly need replacing for another 2. Similar for Ryzen chips from 5 years ago!
Things have changed a lot in 20 years. In 2005 we didn't consume all of our video / audio media online. We didn't have social media, just blogs and RSS readers. YouTube had just been released. TikTok, Facebook and Twitter didn't exist. Hypermedia today is very rich and necessitates a lot of resources. But at the same time, most work the past 10 years has been on native apps (on mobile particularly but also PCs), not web sites. Most people don't use the web browser as much.
windows 10 is easier to use than windows 95.
osx is easier to use than mac.. whatever they named their old versions.
It goes on and on. I can have 50 browser tabs open at the same time, each one hosting a highly complicated app, ranging from media playback to chat rooms to custom statistical calculators. I don't need to install anything for any of these apps, I just type in a short string in my url bar. And they all just work, at the same time.
Things are in fact better now.