It's actually a good question because the average user won't really ever see where the speed and additional memory capacity gets used.<p>The faster the computer is, and the more memory it has at hand, the more technology can be abstracted away from the users and developers.<p>Ease of use is the Operating System's job. If you boot up a DOS with Windows 3.1 disk, you'll find it runs pretty fast. BUT it is also lacking a lot of the comfort features that make computing easier. As speed and memory constraints get dealt with in <i>many</i> ways (price, new tech, etc) more of those ease-of-use functions start to appear.<p>To a lot of regular "desktop" users, this may not be very visible. But for example, look at graphic apps. Try to duplicate what you can do on a modern graphic app on a Windows 3.1 computer. How about something as simple to use as Blender? If you can do it, it'll take you a very long time, because without the memory and speed, you can't abstract enough of the hard work away.<p>The only thing that trumps clock speed are features ("tricks" in some cases perhaps) like hyperthreading, super computing, multiple cores, etc.<p>We can't speed our brains up. We can make a gentler learning curve, and make all the functionality of the software faster, smoother, easier. And that requires memory, speed and multiple threads.<p>It's worth noting that early QNX and Amiga operating systems actually did extraordinarily well with very few resources. However, maintaining them as the hardware improved was very intensive and expensive.