Macintouch has a really interesting note today about the really slow speed of the new, small, energy-efficient drives showing up in some laptops. I can attest to the fact that, on a Mac, slower drives make a huge difference in the feel of running some programs. My 18-month-old iBook G4 often feels slower than desktop Macs that are older and have slower CPUs; I assume that is because my laptop has a standard laptop drive in it.
I also suspect that most mainstream OSs will become more, not less, dependent on drive speed in the future, even though the ratio of laptop users to desktop users continues to go up. Maybe Microsoft and Apple should require their developers to spend half the week on a laptop.
Posted by lookit at December 13, 2005 10:28 AM