SSDs came out after CPUs started to slow down on doubling (single threaded) performance every 12-18mo or so.

So it was the only way to get that visceral improvement in user experience like CPU and platform upgrades were in the mid 90's to very early 00's.

The experience of just slapping a new SSD in a 3 year old machine was similar to a different generation of computer nerds.

Nothing could really match the night and day difference of an entire machine being double to triple the performance in a single upgrade though. Not even the upgrade from spinning disks to SSD. You'd go from a game being unplayable on your old PC to it being smooth as butter overnight. Not these 20% incremental improvements. Sure, load times didn't get too much better - but those started to matter more when the CPU upgrades were no longer a defining experience.

Sure, but what about once Photoshop was open? Aka where you spend most of your day after you start up your stuff?

Would you take the SSD and a 500Mhz processor or a 2Ghz dual-core with a 7200k or 10000k HD? "Some operations are faster" vs "every single thing is wildly faster" of the every-few-years quadrupling+ of CPU perf, memory amounts, disk space, etc.

(45sec to load Photoshop also isn't tracking with my memory, though 30s-1min boot certainly is, but I'm not invested enough to go try to dig up my G4 PowerBook and test it out... :) )