"A few behemoth applications, such as LibreOffice and Gimp, still keep “Quit” separate from “Close” for the original reason — to save you from having to wait for the application to relaunch after closing its only document. But that is fixable, and all other applications have become fast enough that they don’t need it any more. After all, they’re running on hardware that is hundreds of times faster than it was in 1984."
"all other applications have become fast enough that they don’t need it any more". I'm glad this person has decided what I should consider 'fast enough'. So kind of him.
As much as I didn't really like the Mac 'quit' model (as distinct from closing the last document window), most apps still take a long time - meaning I can notice it - when opening from a cold start. Perhaps when everyone has SSDs this will be less noticeable, but it's still noticeable/measurable to me.
I remember working with a guy in 1997 who was fawning over how fast the next Windows was going to be. "It'll boot up in, like, 4 seconds!". Right... however fast our hardware becomes, our apps fill up the hardware with more 'stuff'.
While CPUs have gotten much faster (60%/year), memory hasn't kept up (barely 10%/year). Most programs spend much of their time moving data around in memory, because common programming styles lead to data that is extremely fragmented (poor locality) - memory is the bottleneck, not processor speeds.
That's a bit depressing to hear. The SSD perf I've seen on laptops seemed great, but I suspect that in conjunction with slower memory, we'll still see issues. :/
Yes, I agree. I'll caveat my original statement by saying this; I use Windows (work machine), and I'm using the SSD's they gave me, so they may not even be good ones.
That said, I can come nowhere near the performance of a video where some guy wired up a bunch of SSD's, then opened every microsoft office application at once and they just popped up on his screen. Some crude timings below (in seconds; time to open from the "Start" menu, till the hourglass morphs back to an arrow):
Now, you may be saying "DUDE! That's awesome!" and yes, it is, compared to platters. But it's not instantaneous, and as soon as your context readjusts, you still notice the startup time.
Now, you may be saying "DUDE! That's awesome!" and yes, it is, compared to platters
???
I'm saying "which co-worker swiped your SSDs while you weren't looking?". Quick test here, I rebooted Vista and opened Office apps, with a stopwatch timer in the other hand, rounded to closest half a second the results are:
Word: 3s, Excel: 2s, Outlook: 3.5s (no mail in it), OneNote: not present, PowerPoint: 2.5s
That's from a 5400rpm WD Blue laptop drive, on a Core 2 Duo laptop.
"all other applications have become fast enough that they don’t need it any more". I'm glad this person has decided what I should consider 'fast enough'. So kind of him.
As much as I didn't really like the Mac 'quit' model (as distinct from closing the last document window), most apps still take a long time - meaning I can notice it - when opening from a cold start. Perhaps when everyone has SSDs this will be less noticeable, but it's still noticeable/measurable to me.
I remember working with a guy in 1997 who was fawning over how fast the next Windows was going to be. "It'll boot up in, like, 4 seconds!". Right... however fast our hardware becomes, our apps fill up the hardware with more 'stuff'.