The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

I'm sure it's significantly more expensive to render than Windows 3.11 - XP were - rounded corners and scalable vector graphics instead of bitmaps or whatever - but surely not that much? And the resulting graphics can be cached.

First up, the smartphone itself had to evolve a hell of a lot over 18 years or so. Go try to use an iPhone 1 and you'll quickly see all of the roadblocks and what we now consider poor design choices littered everywhere, vs improvements we've all taken for granted since then.

18 years ago was 2007? Then we didn't have (for better or for worse on all points):

* Video streaming services

* Decent video game market places or app stores. Maybe "Battle.net" with like 5 games, lol!

* VSCode-style IDEs (you really would not have appreciated Visual Studio or Eclipse of the time..)

* Mapping applications on a phone (there were some stand-alone solutions like Garmin and TomTom just getting off the ground)

* QR Codes (the standard did already exist, but mass adoption would get nowhere without being carried by the smartphone)

* Rideshare, food, or grocery delivery services (aside from taxis and whatever pizza or chinese places offered their own delivery)

* Voice-activated assistants (including Alexa and other standalone devices)

* EV Cars (that anyone wanted to buy) or partial autopilot features aside from 1970's cruise control

* Decent teleconferencing (Skype's featureset was damn limited at the time, and any expensive enterprise solutions were dead on the launchpad due to lack of network effects)

* Decent video displays (flatscreens were still busy trying to mature enough to push CRTs out of the market at this point)

* Color printers were far worse during this period than today, though that tech will never run out of room for improvement.

* Average US Internet speeds to the home were still ~1Mbps, with speeds to cellphone of 100kbps being quite luxurious. Average PCs had 2GB RAM and 50GB hard drive space.

* Naturally: the tech everyone loves to hate such as AI, Cryptocurrencies, social network platforms, "The cloud" and SaaS, JS Frameworks, Python (at least 3.0 and even realistically heavy adoption of 2.x), node.js, etc. Again "Is this a net benefit to humanity" and/or "does this get poorly or maliciously used a lot" doesn't speak to whether or not a given phenomena is innovative, and all of these objectively are.

IPC could be 80x higher when taking into account SIMD and then you have to multiply by each core. Mainstream CPUs are more like 1 to 2 million times faster than what was there in the 80s.

You can get full refurbished office computers that are still in the million times faster range for a few hundred dollars.

The things you are describing don't have much to do with computers being slow and feeling slow, but they are happening anyway.

Scripting languages that are constantly allocating memory to any small operation and pointer chasing ever variable because the type is dynamic is part of the problem, then you have people writing extremely inefficient programs in an already terrible environment.

Most programs are written now in however way the person writing them wants to work, not how someone using it wishes they were written.

Most people have actually no concept of optimization or what runs faster than something else. The vast majority of programs are written by someone who gets it to work and thinks "this is how fast this program runs".

The idea that the same software can run faster is a niche thought process, not even everyone on hacker news thinks about software this way.

That's where FOSS or even proprietary "shared source" wins. You know if the software you depend on is generally badly or generally well programmed. You may not be able to find the bugs, but you can see how long the functions are, the comments, and how things are named. YMMV, but conscientiousness is a pretty great signal of quality; you're at least confident that their code is clean enough that they can find the bugs.

Basically the opposite of the feeling I get when I look at the db schemas of proprietary stuff that we've paid an enormous amount for.