The performance difference really can’t be overstated. When my previous laptop crapped out after a solid 8 year innings (right in the middle of typing up my dissertation, but that’s another story) I bought a brand new second hand one for £300. It was… okay, at the time, but didn’t age well.
A few years later, I decided that I wanted to upgrade it a bit and spent almost the same amount on an SSD. It cut the boot time to about a tenth of the time it had taken before and improved performance enough that I could actually use it to play (some, old) games, which had previously been entirely unplayable.
I get that the HDD was old, tired and crappy to begin with and that it was a POS laptop anyway, but I can’t imagine going back to HDD for the OS partition in any PC I own from now on.
My current PC is hooked up to the TV in the living room, has one 500gb SSD for the OS, one 250gb SSD just for Steam and a terabyte HDD for media storage/backup. It boots faster than the TV it is hooked up to and despite the fact it only has a GTX 680, I have yet to find a game it can’t run.
If you’re backing everything up anyway, why wouldn’t you want an SSD? My original one (recycled into the new PC) is still going strong after 4 years and the difference between accessing data on the HDD and SSDs is like night and day. My old laptop, on the other hand, is basically unusable now I have switched out the SSD for a new HDD…
Because there’s nothing wrong with my laptop, other than that it’s six years old.
The only time I notice a real performance issue is playing Firewatch. My main game is Minecraft, and my main version for it is the pocket edition.
Otherwise I use my laptop for the usual Libreoffice work, but also for trying out things like Splunk server.
A laptop with the same specs as my old one except with SSD costs $300 more than my current laptop did six years ago. I’m just not impressed enough to shell out the cash.
For me, accessible hardware and drivers are the key.
None of the “need to use sunglasses to use the screen, because the minimum brightness setting is too bright and burns my eyes,” “need to wear ear protection to use the computer, because the chipset gives off a loud 22 kHz squeel,” none of that “need to install kernel patches to use the keyboard, because the Ubuntu-certified touchpad has no Linux drivers, and because Ubuntu treats it as a PS/2 mouse, and treats any hand motion within 2.54 cm as a deliberate tap if not a deliberate double-click,” none of that “you need to reconfigure everything after each update because Shuttleworth doesn’t like scrollbars and thinks gestures and tendon-rippers are enough to replace scrollbars.”
If I could test enough devices, I might find a suitable Linux machine.
If I could get a larger quiet drive, I might partition things for a Mac/Linux machine.
Unfortunately running a pure Mac machine makes it hard to avoid the default animation, impossible to widen the scrollbars, etc.
I wonder when the post-meltdown processors will be available.
Should be much quicker for ARM, and potentially for AMD.
Spectre could take somewhat longer IIUC. ARM users have at least the option of starting with a low-mid range CPU (A53) and repeating the process of adding speculative execution from scratch but this time without the problems. That might take no more than a year. It looks like the 845 is the end of an era.
But Intel’s architecture is so baked in that it may need a change of mindset as well as re-engineering.
