He's totally right about using an SSD as the boot disk, I can't overstate how much of a difference it makes, more than RAM, CPU or anything else. I've been using one for a while and it made my secondhand 3-4 year old macbook pro go from barely usable for design work to screaming top of the line.
I'm probably going to switch to a hybrid drive soon though, like the 500GB Momentus XT that comes with a 4GB SSD glued on. The big drawbacks of using a pure SSD as a boot disk are that you'll either 1) run out of space on the SSD and/or 2) forced to keep the data on a slower separate drive, assuming that you're going with a moderately priced one and not spending a gazillion dollars for one of the big ones with a lot of capacity. #2 might not matter to the OP because he said he upgraded his rig just for the web browsing, but designers like me routinely load up and work with large files, so I still get the beach ball every time Fireworks tries to open a file or save it. This is where I differ from the OP and the Jeff Atwood article he linked to: I'd rather put all of my data on just as fast a disk as the one with the OS and apps. The slowdown in opening large files is super annoying after you've gotten used to the near instant times for booting the OS and starting up apps.
If I had one of the newer MBPs that came with a SATA interface for the optical drive (instead of IDE like mine), I'd seriously consider splurging and going with Stammy's dual RAID SSD setup:
http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-apple-macbook-pro-raid-0-arr...
Even though I can't use it for RAID, I'm still going to swap out the optical drive for an older IDE-compatible MCE optibay with a generic 500GB drive just for backups with time machine and super duper. That way I can ditch the pocket drive I've been carrying around this whole year and leave it at home for nightly backups.
Can someone explain to me why an SSD should be a big win for web browsing?
Good SSD: on the order of 20,000 IO ops per second.
Now consider a hard page fault or disk access (browser cache, whatever) and reverse the above numbers:
Conventional drive: ~1 ms / disk access
Good SSD: 50 microseconds / disk access
That adds up quickly.
I bought the new 15" MBP that was released this year with 2.4Ghz i5, and put 8GB plus an Intel X-25 SSD in there. Compared to my 2009 MBP w/ 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB and HDD, it's a bigger speed difference than I've ever gotten in any upgrade ever. Definitely worth paying 40x for the drive space.
It's not that the top speed is faster... it's just that the beach ball is gone. It's always responsive. I can be running test suites for a couple Rails apps, watching an HD movie, and browser testing IE6/7/8 in 3 Parallels VMs and it's always snappy. I'm totally spoiled for computers with the OS on an HD. Using my wife's new MacBook for 30 seconds starts to make my blood pressure rise.
I could see this being different if I had to wait for things to compile, though. But still, double is a pretty large claim.
Reinstalling the OS (edit: from scratch. ie, format the drive + install). I make a point to do so at least once per year. OSX has aged significantly more gracefully than Windows, despite having several times as many files (approached 3 million near the end), but a two-year-old install (I slacked) is nothing like a fresh one. Especially noticeable: Spotlight actually finds what I'm looking for in less than a second again (vs upwards of a minute or more).
It also highlights the differences between the OSes: OSX handles loads and loads of applications at the same time with significantly less slowdown and zero waiting on the UI. Windows launches and handles a single application much more quickly, but it's not uncommon to wait a significant amount of time for a single click to register if I launch a couple large ones at once. Just today I've had to sit for a couple minutes because a large compile+launch decided to happen at the same time as a browser crash and an application auto-updating. Win 7 utterly stopped responding, except for my mouse cursor's movement.
edit: to all repliers suggesting Linux: yes it does, if you consider reinstalling to be "reinstalling from scratch", which was what I had meant (though not stated, apologies). Every OS slows with extensions + libraries + millions of files + hundreds of compiled applications, and I'm likely a bit of an edge case anyway. I pretty easily install 1000+ applications per year for experimenting, many of which add extra cruft that no uninstaller removes completely.
After running Linux for more than 5 years now, I have never felt my system "age." I.e., it may become slower than newer computers but it never becomes slower than it used to be.
Of course I do kernel updates from time to time, but those keep all my local data and applications in place, so they are not like reinstalling the OS for Windows or OSX.
I know that you went on to talk about OSX and Windows, but you did say OS, so I thought I'll drop by and mention that reinstalling Linux will not give you a performance improvement.
The SSD in the machine will probably need to be replaced.
It would be nice to know how much ram he had in the new vs old machine. I bet the SSD + more RAM was probably where most of the performance gain came from. He might have seen similar performance gain by just upgrading those two components.
-- Bill Gates, 1985
Why? Here's an article estimating a 50 year lifetime for current SSDs based on writing at max speed 24x7, and claiming that the "it will wear out quickly" myth no longer applies.
I was like that too and then got a fairly high end laptop with a fast 7200 rpm harddrive and 4 gigs of RAM which made the concept of "swaptime" when booting up my programming environment or compiling or doing both programming, music and graphics - a mere memory.
I've never been more creative.
Ditch the 7200RPM, get an SSD.
It is that big a difference.
