My first DOS computer was a 286-based system. This was in a time when most folks still had 8088 or 8086 systems, so mine was the hot rod in my dorm at the time. It was pretty fast, for the era at least, and I never really had to wait on it doing many things. Of course, back then we didn’t ask our computers to do the sorts of things we ask them to do now, either.

Three years later, I bought a new computer. It was a stupid-fast 33Mhz 80386 system — top of the line at the time — and it was a complete fucking screamer. My buddy Mike and I spent hours basically marveling at how ridiculously quick it was at EVERYTHING. Even doing a directory list was blazingly quick. It was, truly, life in the future.

In the 21 years since that day, I’ve bought lots of computers, but I’ve never had an upgrade that blew me away like that again. Things got more incremental, as is the case with most progressions. The Pentium I replaced the 386 with was quicker, but Windows was more bloated, so the actual user experience uptick wasn’t that dramatic. That became the rule, even with the on-paper giant boosts in power that I’ve gained in my last few Macs. Quite frankly, for most people and most tasks, you’re nowhere nearly CPU bound — other things are in the way. Like, say, hard drive speeds.

That’s where the new development comes in. I say I haven’t had a “holy shit” upgrade experience in 21 years, but that’s no longer true. See, I bought one of these to replace the ailing traditional hard drive in my Macbook Pro, and when I booted it back up after the (lengthy) restore process, I was reminded of nothing so much as the first few minutes with that Gateway 386 in 1991.

Everything happens IMMEDIATELY now. There is never a disk delay. The absurdly fast processor is free to be, well, absurdly fast. Notoriously piggy apps (I’m looking at you, Office) spring to life like tiny utilities. Even Lightroom opens with a speed that beggars belief. Task switching? Trivial. My Windows VM sings. If I’d realized how dramatic this upgrade was going to be, I’d have done it years ago.