alt Hacker NewsPart of why Windows feels sluggish is because a lot of the components in many Windows machines are dogshit - especially storage. Even the old M2 is at 1400 MB/s write speed [2], M5 is at 6068 MB/s [2]. Meanwhile in the Windows world, supposed "gamer" laptops struggle to get above 3 GB/s [3]. And on top of that, on Apple devices the storage is directly attached to the SoC - as far as I know, no PCIe, no nothing, just dumb NAND. That alone eliminates a lot of latency, and communication data paths are direct as well, with nothing pesky like sockets or cables degrading signal quality and requiring link training and whatnot.
That M2 MBA however, it only feels sluggish at > 400 Chrome tabs open because only then swapping becomes a real annoyance.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2022/07/14/m2-macbook-air-slower-ssd-bas...
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/macbooks/m5-macbook-pro...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/AcerNitro/comments/1i0nbt4/slow_ssd...
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Hmm, for most desktop stuff, you're still limited to random access, where even if leagues above HDD, the NVMe still suck compared to sequential. It's sad that intel killed Optane/3D X-point, because those are mych better at random workloads and they had still lower latencies than the latest NVMe (not by much anymore).
> Part of why Windows feels sluggish is because a lot of the components in many Windows machines are dogshit - especially storage.
Except that you can replace Windows with Linux and suddenly it doesn't feel like dogshit anymore. SSDs are fast enough that they should be adding zero perceived latency for ordinary day-to-day operation. In fact, Linux still runs great on a pure spinning disk setup, which is something no other OS can manage today.