I suspect you will find many real "tech nerds" who develop the technology (as opposed to the "I heckin' love technology" crowd) would agree with you. Certainly I do.
But to defend the Computer Engineers for a moment, much of the blood that is squeezed from the "marginally improve x86 ISA performance" stone is instantly consumed by programmers adding yet another layer of Javascript to the shitty web app that used to be a native Win32 app.
When I went through University 20-ish years ago the thing that was drilled into our heads was "programmer time is worth more than CPU time", which meant that you weren't supposed to care so much about performance because computers were fast and would continue to get faster. Which sounds great when you're a programmer who always has more work than he can possibly do, but when that's what'd drilled into programmers' heads for 20-30 years...well we live the consequences of that tradeoff every day.
If you want a "this is what they took from us" moment in computing, try installing Windows XP and Office 2003 on a modern computer. XP boots in about 5 seconds, and Word 2003 loading is "blink and you'll miss it" fast. In other words, it's what you'd have wanted and expected out of technological improvement over time.
Meanwhile what you actually get is booting Win10 and modern Word takes about as long as it did to boot XP and Word 2003 on 2003 era hardware.
I suspect you will find many real "tech nerds" who develop the technology (as opposed to the "I heckin' love technology" crowd) would agree with you. Certainly I do.
But to defend the Computer Engineers for a moment, much of the blood that is squeezed from the "marginally improve x86 ISA performance" stone is instantly consumed by programmers adding yet another layer of Javascript to the shitty web app that used to be a native Win32 app.
When I went through University 20-ish years ago the thing that was drilled into our heads was "programmer time is worth more than CPU time", which meant that you weren't supposed to care so much about performance because computers were fast and would continue to get faster. Which sounds great when you're a programmer who always has more work than he can possibly do, but when that's what'd drilled into programmers' heads for 20-30 years...well we live the consequences of that tradeoff every day.
If you want a "this is what they took from us" moment in computing, try installing Windows XP and Office 2003 on a modern computer. XP boots in about 5 seconds, and Word 2003 loading is "blink and you'll miss it". In other words, it's what you'd have wanted and expected out of technological improvement over time.
Meanwhile what you actually get is booting Win10 and modern Word takes about as long as it did to boot XP and Word 2003 on 2003 era hardware.