For some reason everyone prefers the newer software, though. Perhaps there’s more to it than binary size?
People have aesthetic complaints about "bloat", but again this is orthogonal to the actual speed of anything.
Bloat making software bigger will in many cases also make it slower.
Also, the UX on Windows 95 was consistent and easy to learn. Now, much software fail on stuff like disabling a button when you have clicked it and the computer is working.
MacOS is on a steady curve to the bottom. It is not alone.
The software bloat and decreasing quality is a serious issue.
Latency when the system is under low load was definitely better, although a big contributor to that is changes in input and display hardware. But otherwise I'd much rather have today's "bloated" experience over the real world of the '90s.
In the case of Apple, it's often Apple software eating up the benefits of Apple hardware.
Unfortunately subtle differences (such as improved reliability/security or a streamlined workflow) are lost in the computing market, where people are attracted to the new and shiny rather than the old and usable. Also designers like to mess with things.
And yet Electron apps often garnish that memory bloat and computational inefficiency with sluggish performance and a clunky user experience.
It's a shame when an 8GB Mac mini doesn't have enough RAM to run apps comfortably. Of course there's a bit of a corrupt bargain going on between bloated software and Apple since the latter wants to upsell you to a more expensive model.
I wouldn't consider an iPad Mini 1st generation to be very retro, but I still need to run a MITM proxy for it to be able to browse Wikipedia(!).
Monthly bills are stopping me. Can I use Apple's MPW C compiler to build for iOS?
You need to search for it on old ftp sites.
> For some reason everyone prefers the newer software, though. Perhaps there’s more to it than binary size?
The compilers have "evolved". Compiling old code is challenging, to say the least. I do compile old programs when the new seem to explode: xpdf, xsnow.
Compiling old compilers is impossible because they rely on ancient kernel headers.
