The speed increases you gain with new computing hardware and new generations of operating systems are soon taken away by ever increasing bloat in newer software.
Not to mention the bloat that comes in from the forced OS updates that also included big feature updates, that may not benefit the hardware that is installed on the local machine and in fact, may be a detriment to it.
That same thing can be applied to SaaS software and their rolling release software that is pushed at a yearly rate, which probably has memory leaks out the ying yang due to that truncated schedule in order to give the impression to their consumers (not customers, but consumers, big difference) that it is worth this new pricing schema.
But with as sloppy as developers have been it won't be more than a few years before those hardware specs give you a computer takes a couple or more minutes to boot and run programs really slowly.
It's not just the 3rd party devs, there are some things that MS is doing on their own that devs have to follow. For instance, let's stick with the audio. Back during the wonderful Vista days, in MS' infinite wisdom, decided to make the audio not handled directly by the kernel, but through a vm layer. Sound back in the 9x days, was actually better with less compared to what it is today. And that is directly related to that decision at MS. Sure it's gotten better, but only proportional to the quality of equipment that you get. All related to that poor decision(my opinion mind you). That affects all 3rd party firmware, software, hardware.
Some actually goes back to legacy elements in Windows (I made reference to this in the other thread). Still have those legacy bits in there, devs are still going to target those libs. Windows really needs to start over, there is a lot of legacy bloat in there. Problem is, people will lose their precious legacy compatibility. There really is no innocent party here. Some of this is due to the OS vendor, some of this is due to the 3rd party vendors as well.
MS, because it is their OS, can make things as hard or as easy for devs as they want to and they make it hard in some instances. Sometimes, I can understand and even in the others, I can somewhat understand, but I find it more troublesome (ignoring the host file contents etc).
I am the last one to make excuses for this idiocy, but,
These days they take way too many functions away from hardware and make everything a software device
Of course they will. That serves two purposes, at least. 1 they can go with the subscription service. 2 they can also claim more IP and make it to where people don't really own anything as it is heavily dependent on the software component.
I would also say that they are also dumbing down the UI as well. I'm reading that some students don't even know file/folder hierarchy anymore. Really pretty bad as that should be a simple thing.