This is the exact feeling I had. My 2019 intel MacBook Pro has 12 cores, 32gb ram and a 1TB hard drive. Yet, most consumer web apps like Gmail, Outlook and Teams are excruciatingly slow.
What is surprising is that a few years ago, these apps weren’t so terrible on this exact hardware.
I’m convinced that there’s an enormous amount of bloat right at the application framework level.
I finally caved and bought a new M series Mac and the apps are much snappier. But this is simply because the hardware is wicked fast and not because the software got any better.
I really wish consumer apps cared less about user retention and focused more on user empowerment.
All it would take is forcing an artificial CPU slowdown to something like a 5 year old CPU when testing/dogfooding apps for developers to start caring about performance more.
> All it would take is forcing an artificial CPU slowdown
Technically, yes. But for many large tech companies it would require a large organisational mindset shift to go from more features is more promotions is more money to good, stable product with well maintained codebase is better and THAT would require a dramatic shift away from line must go up to something more sustainable and less investor/stock obsessed.
What is surprising is that a few years ago, these apps weren’t so terrible on this exact hardware.
I’m convinced that there’s an enormous amount of bloat right at the application framework level.
I finally caved and bought a new M series Mac and the apps are much snappier. But this is simply because the hardware is wicked fast and not because the software got any better.
I really wish consumer apps cared less about user retention and focused more on user empowerment.