Your $3,000 PC Is Slower Than a 1995 Machine

Your $3,000 laptop opens a chat app slower than a 1995 machine opened a text editor — and the hardware is not the problem. Modern software bloat is a choice we keep making, one abstraction layer at a time.

We have 16-core processors running apps that take four seconds to render a login screen. A chat app eats more RAM than an entire 1995 workstation. A text editor ships as a 200MB Electron wrapper. Developers reach for the framework that ships fastest, not the one that runs fastest — and efficiency stopped being part of the contract with the user. So is this a deadline problem or a competence problem? Leave your answer below.

FAQ
Why is modern software slower than old software despite faster hardware? Because each abstraction layer (runtime, framework, web wrapper) trades raw performance for developer convenience, and those costs stack.
What is software bloat? Software that consumes far more memory, CPU, and disk than its actual function requires — often because it ships through hea…