> I hit the mute button on my MacBook Pro Touchbar, and it took a solid two seconds for it to register. My ears were ringing throughout the whole call. This is

> I hit the mute button on my MacBook Pro Touchbar, and it took a solid two seconds for it to register. My ears were ringing throughout the whole call. This is unacceptable. Well-engineered mute buttons on keyboards shouldn’t need to go to software, they should immediately send a signal to the motherboard’s DAC—ideally on a separate wire or connection—to say terminate this signal. Then it’s less of a concern if it takes the OS a few seconds to react to the change, because our ears have been spared. "Should not need to go to software?" I'm not sure. I have a Yamaha AV receiver on my desk. The huge volume knob has the best user experience than any software-based solution, unlike menus or hotkeys, it's always in my reach and instantaneously responses to my inputs. It has smooth mechanical damping, giving a satisfying touch and feel. I can immediately turn the volume down in a second if there's misbehaving, non-normalized loud audio. I did it from time to time. On the other hand, I clearly know it's software-driven. The knob is nothing but an user interface. It's an optical rotary encoder, not a real potentiometer. When the knob is turned, it chops a beam of light, and an optical sensor converts the optical pulse to a digital signal, which is then sent to a GPIO pin on the application processor in the AV receiver. The firmware on the application processor receives an IRQ, then commands the DAC via the system bus (could be I2C) to increase or decrease the volume in a 0.5 dB step. It's 100% software driven, not hardware driven. The software can fail, yet the software never let me down. We can get another conclusion from this: Special-purpose computing is more reliable than general-purpose computing. The operating system handles everything, and has numerous failure modes due to its unpredictability. Furthermore, it's in a constant state of change to bring the "Next Great Things", who cares if the audio mixer or the TouchBar becomes a bit slow? An AV receiver only needs to do one thing, so it can do this well.