"By the time the user purchased a new computer, the company had a new software version that already uses up whatever resource gains the new hardware provided. Pre-installed. The end result is the user experiences the same speed."
This is true, but there's a couple of other factors involved. One is the recent gains in storage efficiency, and the other is familiarity over time with the new gains. When SSDs hit the scene, you could migrate your existing installation to solid state storage and see immediate, measurable gains. Then PC manufacturers started shipping SSDs as standard equipment, and folks got used to that level of performance. Essentially, it became the new normal. A while later NVMe hit the scene and suddenly even traditional SSDs began to feel "too slow". Again, manufacturers are beginning to ship NVMe-based units, pushing the tolerance levels even further out.
I've experienced this recently; my main workstation has a Skylake CPU, DDR4 RAM, and an NVMe OS drive, with a SSHD (solid state hybrid drive) for storage. I recently revived an older but still very fast workstation with a standard HDD, and it felt like I'd gone back to the "Windows Vista Capable" days of the late 2000s. Same OS (Windows 10 and Elementary OS), same software, technically faster CPU on the older workstation, but it was so "slow" I could barely stand to use it. I felt like I was waiting ages for applications to start or web pages to load, even though it was usually less than a few seconds difference. But oh, what a difference those precious seconds can make in human perception!
"When SSDs hit the scene, you could migrate your existing installation to solid state storage."
If by "installation" you mean the OS, I have not needed SSDs. I migrated my installation to RAM. I stopped using disk for the OS and data I am working with. I can fit everything I need in RAM. I still use disks sometimes for long term storage of infrequently accessed data, but it surprises me how infrequently I need them. For me the recognition of "immediate gains" in speed was not with the advent of SSDs it was with the availability of >= 500MB RAM. Diskless became too easy.
But I do understand what SSDs have done for other users with different requirements and I think that has been a great improvement.
Indeed, latency is very important. For a while I used an SD card + adapter in my laptop as the main boot drive (mainly for the shock resistance), and although sequential accesses were quite a bit slower than the HDD it replaced, the near-zero access time meant it was noticeably more responsive in practice with lots of random access I/O.
This is true, but there's a couple of other factors involved. One is the recent gains in storage efficiency, and the other is familiarity over time with the new gains. When SSDs hit the scene, you could migrate your existing installation to solid state storage and see immediate, measurable gains. Then PC manufacturers started shipping SSDs as standard equipment, and folks got used to that level of performance. Essentially, it became the new normal. A while later NVMe hit the scene and suddenly even traditional SSDs began to feel "too slow". Again, manufacturers are beginning to ship NVMe-based units, pushing the tolerance levels even further out.
I've experienced this recently; my main workstation has a Skylake CPU, DDR4 RAM, and an NVMe OS drive, with a SSHD (solid state hybrid drive) for storage. I recently revived an older but still very fast workstation with a standard HDD, and it felt like I'd gone back to the "Windows Vista Capable" days of the late 2000s. Same OS (Windows 10 and Elementary OS), same software, technically faster CPU on the older workstation, but it was so "slow" I could barely stand to use it. I felt like I was waiting ages for applications to start or web pages to load, even though it was usually less than a few seconds difference. But oh, what a difference those precious seconds can make in human perception!