People forget that Winamp was instant on a 60Mhz machine with a spinning rust drive. It’s difficult to buy a computer that slow these days. Modern CPUs modulate their speeds by far more than that as part of their moment by moment power management!
When I first bought an SSD and noticed the crazy speed-up, my next thought was that developers will get used to it as the "new normal" and stop caring about IOPS which would slow down SSDs (ruining my blink-of-an-eye super-speed fun) and make HDDs near-unusable. Two to four years later, here we were on Windows, and to some extent, on Linux too.
The amount of effort involved in making sure reads were sequential back in the HDD days was immense. It’s not surprising people dropped that as soon as possible.
Because streaming music is a trivial task, computationally-wise. It could have had some performance impact in 2000, but we're in 2021 now.
And nothing else related to the functional differences between Spotify and WinAMP can explain why Spotify is slow. Done properly, it should feel snappier than WinAMP felt in 2000.
It's comparable only on an abstract level - mostly because there's hardly anybody who really wants/needs "all music in existence over the internet", most people just want to "listen to music that I like".
It really did not for me by that standard. I have access to orders of magnitude more music now that I know I like than I did during the Winamp days and I was a pretty early and savvy user back then so I had more access than a lot of people.
If we're trading music player performance for the massive increase in availability I'll make that trade.
But really, 99% of the value-add of Spotify over Winamp is stuff that happens server-side. Your Spotify client doesn’t have a database of all the songs, nor the ML models for computing recommendations. As far as playing streaming music goes, Winamp would happily play an m3u (mmmm soma.fm).
Don’t get me wrong, the discovery and search features in Spotify have brought me a ton of value. But wow is the client resource usage dramatically disproportionate for the added functionality
And the kicker is, the music client is a completely separate concern from a song database, or a recommendation engine.
This is actually a point in favor of directly comparing WinAMP and Spotify - the important "value-add" bits of Spotify all happen server side, so they should have exactly zero impact on client performance.
You could go to the shoutcast website, get the shoutcast links for the radios you were interested in, then make a playlist that could be dealt with just like any other playlist.
Yeah, this is the weirdest thing to me: Windows NT 3.51 on a Pentium was much snappier perceptibly than even my new M1 MBP (developers are already expanding to the new performance envelope).
And didn’t render millions of polygons at 60+ fps, while having many GBs of assets like textures, so I don’t see how is it relevant.
One could write those programs in a truly inefficient manner in a not too performant language and it would run without problem. Today’s computers are really fast.
The problem is that, instead of the speed of modern computers translating to perceptible performance improvements for normal users, it translates to applications that use more resources.
Whether or not the new features make up for the general perceptual slowness of modern computers is a somewhat open question.
I would agree with you, but in terms of games it is simply not a great example. It may be questionable why would we want photorealistic games when 2D, visible pixels are good enough, but games are not known for being inefficient.
Windows Server 2019 has a much snappier UI then Windows 10 I've found (I recently spent a ton of time automating installs for both and boy did that become noticeable).
Then you look at the Windows 10 list of crapware and it becomes a lot clearer.
Vista was a worse abomination on 2 GB of RAM. It's likely that if I installed a build of Windows 10 from 2 years ago on the machine in question, it would be faster than a greased lightning in comparison.
Then you look at the Windows 10 list of crapware and it becomes a lot clearer.
Is there an actual causal relationship? And which crapware specifically? Asking because I only have access to a bunch of Windows 10 Pro machines which already don't seem to have most of crapware on there (i.e. often I see threads here where people complain about all kinds of ads and other things I never even knew existed) and the rest disabled (as far as I can tell) and still it's less snapy than this one Windows Server instance on comparable machine. (and sadly no single modern OS feels as snappy as even Windows XP SP2 for a similar level of functionality on not-so-recent hardware)
The difference is the list of running background services. Kernel and drivers are the same, libraries are the same, but server doesn't have (ex) the AllJoyn Router Service for Smart Things Control, the 4G LTE Push Notifications Service, the WAP Push Message Service, the Fax Service, Windows Image Acquisition, and so on. Candy Crush doesn't run on startup, these do.
The subjectively fastest, which is to say the most responsive or lowest input latency, computer I've ever used was a Macintosh 512ke upgraded to 2.5 megabytes of memory, running the system software and apps off of a 1.5 megabyte RAM-disk. When you double-clicked, say, MacPaint in the Finder, it was loaded before you finished the physical mouseup. This was when that hardware and software was still current.
Spotify runs on all of my devices. In the morning I can ask my smart speaker to play songs that Spotify presumes I like, continue from my car with a voice command, see what my friends are playing or play their playlists. I'll gladly wait for the ~5 seconds it takes for an app to start if it delivers all this.
Of course IRC is much faster, it's also few orders of magnitude simpler than Slack. For work related communications I prefer Slack to IRC, but for chatting with friends IRC does just fine. One simple protocol vs hundreds of APIs that provide extremely rich content. Once again, Slack takes few seconds to launch on a modern machine, it's not that bad considering it does so much.
Yeah shit is slower, shit is also way more connected and complex than in the 90s.
Slack is definitely faster than my IRC client since it's not running over ssh to a host. You can't actually run IRC locally or you'll miss all the chat from when you're not signed in.
Spotify is slower than Winamp, Slack is slower than IRC, Webmail is slower than my e-mail client, VS Code is slower than Visual C++ 6.0.