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Am I taking crazy pills or are programs not nearly as slow as HN comments make them out to be? Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook and 2020 iPh

Am I taking crazy pills or are programs not nearly as slow as HN comments make them out to be? Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook and 2020 iPhone. Every program is incredibly responsive. 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems. The only thing I can think of that’s slow is Autodesk Fusion starting up. Not really sure how they made that so bad but everything else seems super snappy.

mjburgess 1y ago
People conflat the insanity of running a network cable through every application with the poor performance of their computers.
- sgarland 1y ago
  Correction: devs have made the mistake of turning everything into remote calls, without having any understanding as to the performance implications of doing so. Sonos’ app is a perfect example of this. The old app controlled everything locally, since the speakers set up their own wireless mesh network. This worked fantastically well. Someone at Sonos got the bright idea to completely rewrite the app such that it wasn’t even backwards-compatible with older hardware, and everything is now a remote calls. Changing volume? Phone —> Router —> WAN —> Cloud —> Router —> Speakers. Just… WHY. This failed so spectacularly that the CEO responsible stepped down / was forced out, and the new one claims that fixing the app is his top priority. We’ll see.
  - mjburgess 1y ago
    Presumably they wanted the telemetry. It's not clear that this was a dev-initiated switch. Perhaps we can blame the 'statistical monetization' policies of adtech and then AI for all this -- i'm not entirely sold on developers. What, after all, is the difference between an `/etc/hosts` set of loop'd records vs. an ISP's dns -- as far as the software goes?
    - sgarland 1y ago
      You’re right, and I shouldn’t necessarily blame devs for the idea, though I do blame their CTO for not standing up to it if nothing else. Though it’s also unclear to me in this particular case why they couldn’t collect commands being issued, and then batch-send them hourly, daily, etc. instead of having each one route through the cloud.
    - skydhash 1y ago
      > Presumably they wanted the telemetry Why not log them to a file and cron a script to upload the data? Even if the feature request is nonsensical, you can architect a solution that respect the platform's constraints. It's kinda like when people drag in React and Next.js just to have a static website.
      - arolihas 1y ago
        someone out there now has a cool resume line item about doing real time cloud microservices on the edge
  - LocalPCGuy 1y ago
    We (probably) can guess the why - tracking and data opportunities which companies can eventually sell or utilize for profit is some way.
sorcerer-mar 1y ago
I think it's a very theoretical argument: we could of course theoretically make everything even faster. It's nowhere near the most optimal use of the available hardware. All we'd have to give up is squishy hard-to-measure things like "feature sets" and "engineering velocity."
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  > All we'd have to give up is squishy hard-to-measure things like "feature sets" and "engineering velocity." Would we? Really? I don't think giving up performance needs to be a compromise for the number of features or speed of delivering them.
  - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
    People make higher-order abstractions for funzies?
- CyberDildonics 1y ago
  we could of course theoretically make everything even faster. It's nowhere near the most optimal use of the available hardware. All we'd have to give up is squishy hard-to-measure things like "feature sets" and "engineering velocity." Says who? Who are these experienced people that know how to write fast software that think it is such a huge sacrifice? The reality is that people who say things like this don't actually know much about writing fast software because it really isn't that difficult. You just can't grab electron and the lastest javascript react framework craze. These kinds of myths get perpetuated by people who repeat it without having experienced the side of just writing native software. I think mostly it is people rationalizing not learning C++ and sticking to javascript or python because that's what they learned first.
  - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
    > These kinds of myths get perpetuated by people who repeat it without having experienced the side of just writing native software. I think mostly it is people rationalizing not learning assembly and sticking to C++ or PERL because that's what they learned first. Why stop at C++? Is that what you happen to be comfortable with? Couldn't you create even faster software if you went down another level? Why don't you?
high_na_euv 1y ago
Yup, people run software on shitty computers and blame all the software. The only slow (local) software I know is llvm and cpp compilers Other are pretty fast
- maleldil 1y ago
  You have stories of people running 2021 MacBooks and complaining about performance. Those are not shitty computers.
flohofwoe 1y ago
I guess you don't need to wrestle with Xcode? Somehow the Xcode team managed to make startup and some features in newer Xcode versions slower than older Xcode versions running on old Intel Macs. E.g. the ARM Macs are a perfect illustration that software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. After a very short 'free lunch' right after the Intel => ARM transition we're now back to the same old software performance regression spiral (e.g. new software will only be optimized until it feels 'fast enough', and that 'fast enough' duration is the same no matter how fast the hardware is). Another excellent example is the recent release of the Oblivion Remaster on Steam (which uses the brand new UE5 engine): On my somewhat medium-level PC I have to reduce the graphics quality in the Oblivion Remaster so much that the result looks worse than 14-year old Skyrim (especially outdoor environments), and that doesn't even result in a stable 60Hz frame rate, while Skyrim runs at a rock-solid 60Hz and looks objectively better in the outdoors. E.g. even though the old Skyrim engine isn't by far as technologically advanced as UE5 and had plenty of performance issues at launch on a ca. 2010 PC, the Oblivion Remaster (which uses a "state of the art" engine) looks and performs worse than its own 14 years old predecessor. I'm sure the UE5-based Oblivion remaster can be properly optimized to beat Skyrim both in looks and performance, but apparently nobody cared about that during development.
- jayd16 1y ago
  You're comparing the art(!) of two different games, that targeted two different sets of hardware while using the ideal hardware for one and not the other. Kind of a terrible example.
  - flohofwoe 1y ago
    > You're comparing the art(!) The art direction, modelling and animation work is mostly fine, the worse look results from the lack of dynamic lighting and ambient occlusion in the Oblivion Remaster when switching Lumen (UE5's realtime global illumination feature) to the lowest setting, this results in completely flat lighting for the vegetation but is needed to get an acceptable base frame rate (it doesn't solve the random stuttering though). Basically, the best art will always look bad without good lighting (and even baked or faked ambient lighting like in Skyrim looks better than no ambient lighting at all. Digital Foundry has an excellent video about the issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0rCA1vpgSw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0rCA1vpgSw TL;DR: the 'ideal hardware' for the Oblivion Remaster doesn't exist, even if you get the best gaming rig money can buy.
mschild 1y ago
A mix of both. There are large number of websites that are inefficiently written using up unnecessary amounts of resources. Semi-modern devices make up for that by just having a massive amount of computing power. However, you also need to consider 2 additional factors. Macbooks and iPhones, even 4 year old ones, have usually been at the upper end of the scale for processing power. (When compared to the general mass-market of private end-consumer devices) Try doing the same on a 4 year old 400 Euro laptop and it might look a bit different. Also consider your connection speed and latency. I usually have no loading issue either. But I have a 1G fiber connection. My parents don't.
_aavaa_ 1y ago
I'd wager that a 2021 MacBook, like the one I have, is stronger than the laptop used by majority of people in the world. Life on an entry or even mid level windows laptop is a very different world.
- josephg 1y ago
  Yep. Developers make programs run well enough on the hardware sitting on our desks. So long as we’re well paid (and have decent computers ourselves), we have no idea what the average computing experience is for people still running 10yo computers which were slow even for the day. And that keeps the treadmill going. We make everyone need to upgrade every few years. A few years ago I accidentally left my laptop at work on a Friday afternoon. Instead of going into the office, I pulled out a first generation raspberry pi and got everything set up on that. Needless to say, our nodejs app started pretty slowly. Not for any good reason - there were a couple modules which pulled in huge amounts of code which we didn’t use anyway. A couple hours work made the whole app start 5x faster and use half the ram. I would never have noticed that was a problem with my snappy desktop.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    > Yep. Developers make programs run well enough on the hardware sitting on our desks. So long as we’re well paid (and have decent computers ourselves), we have no idea what the average computing experience is for people still running 10yo computers which were slow even for the day. And that keeps the treadmill going. We make everyone need to upgrade every few years. Same thing happens with UI & Website design. When the designers and front-end devs all have top-spec MacBooks, with 4k+ displays, they design to look good in that environment. Then you ship to the rest of the world which are still for the most part on 16:9 1920x1080 (or god forbid, 1366x768), low spec windows laptops and the UI looks like shit and is borderline unstable. Now I don't necessarily think things should be designed for the lowest common denominator, but at the very least we should be taking into consideration that the majority of users probably don't have super high end machines or displays. Even today you can buy a brand new "budget" windows laptop that'll come with 8GB of RAM, and a tiny 1920x1080 display, with poor color reproduction and crazy low brightness - and that's what the majority of people are using, if they are using a computer at all and not a phone or tablet.
tjader 1y ago
I just clicked on the network icon next to the clock on a Windows 11 laptop. A gray box appeared immediately, about one second later all the buttons for wifi, bluetooth, etc appeared. Windows is full of situations like this, that require no network calls, but still take over one second to render.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  It's strange, it visibly loading the buttons is indicative they use async technology that can use multithreaded CPUs effectively... but it's slower than the old synchronous UI stuff. I'm sure it's significantly more expensive to render than Windows 3.11 - XP were - rounded corners and scalable vector graphics instead of bitmaps or whatever - but surely not that much? And the resulting graphics can be cached.
  - vel0city 1y ago
    Windows 3.1 wasn't checking WiFi, Bluetooth, energy saving profile, night light setting, audio devices, current power status and battery level, audio devices, and more when clicking the non-existent icon on the non-existent taskbar. Windows XP didn't have this quick setting area at all. But I do recall having the volume slider take a second to render on XP from time to time, and that was only rendering a slider. And FWIW this stuff is then cached. I hadn't clicked that setting area in a while (maybe the first time this boot?) and did get a brief gray box that then a second later populated with all the buttons and settings. Now every time I click it again it appears instantly.
    - tjader 1y ago
      But is this cache trustworthy or will it eventually lead you to click in the wrong place because the situation changed and now there's a new button making everything change place? And even if every information takes a bit to figure out, it doesn't excuse taking a second to even draw the UI. If checking bluetooth takes a second, then draw the button immediately but disable interaction and show a loading icon, and when you get the blutooth information update the button, and so on for everything else.
subjectsigma 1y ago
I have a 2019 Intel MacBook and Outlook takes about five seconds to load and constantly sputters
CelestialMystic 1y ago
You are using a relatively high end computer and mobile device. Go and find a cheap laptop x86 and try doing the same. It will be extremely painful. Most of this is due to a combination of Windows 11 being absolute trash and JavaScript being used extensively in applications/websites. JavaScript is memory hog and can be extremely slow depending on how it is written (how you deal with loops massively affects the performance). What is frustrating though that until relatively recently these devices would work fine with JS heavy apps and work really well with anything that is using a native toolkit.
g-mork 1y ago
Lightroom non-user detected
alnwlsn 1y ago
It depends. Can Windows 3.11 be faster than Windows 11? Sure, maybe even in most cases: https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html
xnorswap 1y ago
It vastly depends on what software you're forced to use. Here's some software I use all the time, which feels horribly slow, even on a new laptop: Slack. Switching channels on slack, even when you've just switched so it's all cached, is painfully slow. I don't know if they build in a 200ms or so delay deliberately to mask when it's not cached, or whether it's some background rendering, or what it is, but it just feels sluggish. Outlook Opening an email gives a spinner before it's opened. Emails are about as lightweight as it gets, yet you get a spinner. It's "only" about 200ms, but that's still 200ms of waiting for an email to open. Plain text emails were faster 25 years ago. Adding a subset of HTML shouldn't have caused such a massive regression. Teams Switching tabs on teams has the same delayed feeling as Slack. Every iteraction feels like it's waiting 50-100ms before actioning. Clicking an empty calendar slot to book a new event gives 30-50ms of what I've mentally internalised as "Electron blank-screen" but there's probably a real name out there for basically waiting for a new dialog/screen to even have a chrome, let alone content. Creating a new calendar event should be instant, it should not take 300-500ms or so of waiting for the options to render. These are basic "productivity" tools in which every single interaction feels like it's gated behind at least a 50ms debounce waiting period, with often extra waiting for content on top. Is the root cause network hops or telemetry? Is it some corporate antivirus stealing the computer's soul? Ultimately the root cause doesn't actually matter, because no matter the cause, it still feels like I'm wading through treacle trying to interact with my computer.
- maccard 1y ago
  I’d take 50ms but in my experience it’s more like 250.
  - xnorswap 1y ago
    You're probably right, I'm likely massively underestimating the time, it's long enough to be noticable, but not so long that it feels instantly frustrating the first time, it just contributes to an overall sluggishness.
- vel0city 1y ago
  I don't get any kind of spinner on Outlook opening emails. Especially emails which are pure text or only lightly stylized open instantly. Even emails with calendar invites load really fast, I don't see any kind of spinner graphic at all. Running latest Outlook on Windows 11, currently >1k emails in my Inbox folder, on an 11th gen i5, while also on a Teams call a ton of other things active on my machine. This is also a machine with a lot of corporate security tools sapping a lot of cycles.
makeitdouble 1y ago
To note, people will have wildly different tolerance to delays and lag. On the extreme, my retired parents don't feel the difference between 5s or 1s when loading a window or clicking somewhere. I offered a switch to a new laptop, cloning their data, and they didn't give a damn and just opened the laptop the closest to them. Most people aren't that desensitized, but for some a 600ms delay is instantaneous when for other it's 500ms too slow.
maccard 1y ago
Slack, teams, vs code, miro, excel, rider/intellij, outlook, photoshop/affinity are all applications I use every day that take 20+ seconds to launch. My corporate VPN app takes 30 seconds to go from a blank screen to deciding if it’s going to prompt me for credentials or remember my login, every morning. This is on an i9 with 64GB ram, and 1GN fiber. On the website front - Facebook, twitter, Airbnb, Reddit, most news sites, all take 10+ seconds to load or be functional, and their core functionality has regressed significantly in the last decade. I’m not talking about features that I prefer, but as an example if you load two links in Reddit in two different tabs my experience has been that it’s 50/50 if they’ll actually both load or if one gets stuck either way skeletons.
- aloha2436 1y ago
  I'm on a four year old mid-tier laptop and opening VS Code takes maybe five seconds. Opening IDEA takes five seconds. Opening twitter on an empty cache takes perhaps four seconds and I believe I am a long way from their servers. On my work machine slack takes five seconds, IDEA is pretty close to instant, the corporate VPN starts nearly instantly (although the Okta process seems unnecessarily slow I'll admit), and most of the sites I use day-to-day (after Okta) are essentially instant to load. I would say that your experiences are not universal, although snappiness was the reason I moved to apple silicon macs in the first place. Perhaps Intel is to blame.
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    VS Code defers a lot of tasks to the background at least. This is a bit more visible in intellij; you seem to measure how long it takes to show its window, but how long does it take for it to warm up and finish indexing / loading everything, or before it actually becomes responsive? Anyway, five seconds is long for a text editor; 10, 15 years ago, sublime text loaded and opened up a file in <1 second, and it still does today. Vim and co are instant. Also keep in mind that desktop computers haven't gotten significantly faster for tasks like opening applications in the past years; they're more efficient (especially the M line CPUs) and have more hardware for specialist workloads like what they call AI nowadays, but not much innovation in application loading. You use a lot of words like "pretty close to", "nearly", "essentially", but 10, 20 years ago they WERE instant; applications from 10, 20 years ago should be so much faster today than they were on hardware from back then. I wish the big desktop app builders would invest in native applications. I understand why they go for web technology (it's the crossplatform GUI technology that Java and co promised and offers the most advanced styling of anything anywhere ever), but I wish they invested in it to bring it up to date.
viraptor 1y ago
What timescale are we talking about? Many DOS stock and accounting applications were basically instantaneous. There are some animations on iPhone that you can't disable that take longer than a series of keyboard actions of a skilled operator in the 90s. Windows 2k with a stripped shell was way more responsive that today's systems as long as you didn't need to hit the harddrives. The "instant" today is really laggy compared to what we had. Opening Slack takes 5s on a flagship phone and opening a channel which I just had open and should be fully cached takes another 2s. When you type in JIRA the text entry lags and all the text on the page blinks just a tiny bit (full redraw). When pages load on non-flagship phones (i.e. most of the world), they lag a lot, which I can see on monitoring dashboards.
sgarland 1y ago
I’m sure you know this, but a reminder that modern devices cache a hell of a lot, even when you “quit” such that subsequent launches are faster. Such is the benefit of more RAM. I could compare Slack to, say, HexChat (or any other IRC client). And yeah, it’s an unfair comparison in many ways – Slack has far more capabilities. But from another perspective, how many of them do you immediately need at launch? Surely the video calling code could be delayed until after the main client is up, etc. (and maybe it is, in which case, oh dear). A better example is Visual Studio [0], since it’s apples to apples. [0]: https://youtu.be/MR4i3Ho9zZY https://youtu.be/MR4i3Ho9zZY
- anthk 1y ago
  Compare it to qutecom, or any other xmpp client.
lenkite 1y ago
2021 MacBook and 2020 iPhone are not "old". Still using 2018 iPhone. Used a 2021 Macbook until a month ago.
api 1y ago
They're comparing these applications to older applications that loaded instantly on much slower computers. Both sides are right. There is a ton of waste and bloat and inefficiency. But there's also a ton of stuff that genuinely does demand more memory and CPU. An incomplete list: - Higher DPI displays use intrinsically more memory and CPU to paint and rasterize. My monitor's pixel array uses 4-6X more memory than my late 90s PC had in the entire machine. - Better font rendering is the same. - Today's UIs support Unicode, right to left text, accessibility features, different themes (dark/light at a minimum), dynamic scaling, animations, etc. A modern GUI engine is similar in difficulty to a modern game engine. - Encryption everywhere means that protocols are no longer just opening a TCP connection but require negotiation of state and running ciphers. - The Web is an incredibly rich presentation platform that comes with the overhead of an incredibly rich presentation platform. It's like PostScript meets a GUI library meets a small OS meets a document markup layer meets... - The data sets we deal with today are often a lot larger. - Some of what we've had to do to get 1000X performance itself demands more overhead: multiple cores, multiple threads, 64 bit addressing, sophisticated MMUs, multiple levels of cache, and memory layouts optimized for performance over compactness. Those older machines were single threaded machines with much more minimal OSes, memory managers, etc. - More memory means more data structure overhead to manage that memory. - Larger disks also demand larger structures to manage them, and modern filesystems have all kinds of useful features like journaling and snapshots that also add overhead. ... and so on.
- skydhash 1y ago
  Then you install Linux and get all that without the mess that is Win11. Inefficient software is inefficient software.
afavour 1y ago
I think it’s a little more nuanced than the broad takes make it seem. One of the biggest performance issues I witness is that everyone assumes a super fast, always on WiFi/5G connection. Very little is cached locally on device so even if I want to do a very simple search through my email inbox I have to wait on network latency. Sometimes that’s great, often it really isn’t. Same goes for many SPA web apps. It’s not that my phone can’t process the JS (even though there’s way too much of it), it’s poor caching strategies that mean I’m downloading and processing >1MB of JS way more often than I should be. Even on a super fast connection that delay is noticeable.
jayd16 1y ago
A lot of nostalgia is at work here. Modern tech is amazing. If the old tools were actually better people would actually use them. Its not like you can't get them to work.
- ryao 1y ago
  As a regular user of vim, tmux and cscope for programming in C, may I say that not only do I prefer the old tools, but I use them regularly.
mbac32768 1y ago
In Carmack's Lex Fridman interview he says he knows C++ devs who still insist on using some ancient version of MSVC because it's *so fast* compared to the latest, on the latest hardware.
OtherShrezzing 1y ago
Spotify takes 7 seconds from clicking on its icon to playing a song on a 2024 top-of-the-range MacBook Pro. Navigating through albums saved on your computer can take several seconds. Double clicking on a song creates a 1/4sec pause. This is absolutely remarkable inefficiency considering the application's core functionality (media players) was perfected a quarter century ago.
- everdrive 1y ago
  And on RhythmBox, on a 2017 laptop it works instantaneously. These big monetized apps were a huge mistake.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    > These big monetized apps were a huge mistake. It's electron. Electron was a mistake.
asciimov 1y ago
One example is Office. Microsoft is going back to preloading office during Windows Boot so that you don't notice it loading. With the average system spec 25 years ago it made sense to preload office. But today, what is Office doing that it needs to offload its startup to running at boot?
yifanl 1y ago
The Nintendo Switch on a chipset that was outdated a decade ago can run Tears of the Kingdom. It's not sensible that modern hardware is anything less than instant.
- astrange 1y ago
  That's because TOTK is designed to run on it, with careful compromises and a lot of manual tuning. Nintendo comes up with a working game first and then adds the story - BotW/TotK are post-apocalyptic so they don't have to show you too many people on screen at once. The other way you can tell this is that both games have the same story even though one is a sequel! Like Ganon takes over the castle/Hyrule and then Link defeats him, but then they go into the basement and somehow Ganon is there again and does the exact same thing again? Makes no sense.
  - Thedarkb 1y ago
    The framing device for The Legend of Zelda games is that it's a mythological cycle in which Link, Ganon, and Zelda are periodically reborn and the plot begins anew with new characters. It lets them be flexible with the setting, side quests, and characters as the series progresses and it's been selling games for just shy of forty years.
    - astrange 1y ago
      ToTK is a direct sequel to BoTW set a few years later and supposedly starring literally the same people though.
  - yifanl 1y ago
    > That's because TOTK is designed to run on it, with careful compromises and a lot of manual tuning. Should I draw from this conclusion that modern software is not designed to run on modern hardware?
    - astrange 1y ago
      Indeed it isn't. That's hard when everything is fighting against it. Nintendo can do it because they only have one hardware target (unlike multiplatform games) and they can spend an extra year or two doing performance work.
andy12_ 1y ago
Online Word (or Microsoft 365, or whatever it is called) regularly took me 2 minutes to load a 120 page document. I'm being very literal here. You could see it load in real time approximately 1 page a second. And it wasn't a network issue, mind you. It was just that slow. Worse, the document strained my laptop so much as I used it, I regularly had to reload the web-page.
joaohaas 1y ago
Try forcefully closing VSCode and your browser, and see how long it takes to open them again. The same is true for most complex webpages/'webapps' (Slack, Discord, etc). A lot of other native Mac stuff is also less than ideal. Terminal keeps getting stuck all the time, Mail app can take a while to render HTML emails, Xcode is Xcode, and so on.
bjourne 1y ago
Apple unlike the other Silicon Valley giants has figured out that latency >>> throughput. Minimizing latency is much more important for making a program "feel" fast than maximizing latency. Some of the apps I interact with daily are Slack, Teams (ugh), Gmail, and YouTube and they are all slow as dogshit.
KapKap66 1y ago
There's a problem when people who aren't very sensitive to latency and try and track it, and that is that their perception of what "instant" actually means is wrong. For them, instant is like, one second. For someone who cares about latency, instant is less than 10 milliseconds, or whatever threshold makes the difference between input and result imperceptible. People have the same problem judging video game framerates because they don't compare them back to back very often (there are perceptual differences between framerates of 30, 60, 120, 300, and 500, at the minimum, even on displays incapable of refreshing at these higher speeds), but you'll often hear people say that 60 fps is "silky smooth," which is not true whatsoever lol. If you haven't compared high and low latency directly next to each other then there are good odds that you don't know what it looks like. There was a twitter video from awhile ago that did a good job showing it off that's one of the replies to the OP. It's here: https://x.com/jmmv/status/1671670996921896960 https://x.com/jmmv/status/1671670996921896960 Sorry if I'm too presumptuous, however; you might be completely correct and instant is instant in your case.
- JoeAltmaier 1y ago
  I fear that such comments are similar to the old 'a monster cable makes my digital audio sound more mellow!' The eye percieves at about 10 hz. That's 100ms per capture. All the rest, I'd have to see a study that shows how any higher framerate can possibly be perceived or useful.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    >The eye percieves at about 10 hz. That's 100ms per capture. All the rest, I'd have to see a study that shows how any higher framerate can possibly be perceived or useful. It takes effectively no effort to conduct such a study yourself. Just try re-encoding a video at different frame rates up to your monitor refresh rate. Or try looking at a monitor that has a higher refresh rate than the one you normally use.
  - KapKap66 1y ago
    Well if you believe that, start up a video game with a framerate limiter and set your game's framerate limit to 10 fps and tell me how much you enjoy the experience. By default your game will likely be running at either 60 fps or 120 fps if you're vertical synced (depends on your monitor's refresh rate). Make sure to switch back and forth between 10 and 60/120 to compare. Even your average movie captures at 24 hz. Again, very likely you've never actually just compared these things for yourself back to back, as I mentioned originally.
zahlman 1y ago
How long did your computer take to start up, from power off (and no hibernation, although that presumably wasn't a thing yet), the first time you got to use a computer? How long did it take the last time you had to use an HDD rather than SSD for your primary drive? How long did it take the first time you got to use an SSD? How long does it take today? Did literally anything other than the drive technology ever make a significant difference in that, in the last 40 years? > Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook Instantly? Your applications don't have splash screens? I think you've probably just gotten used to however long it does take. > 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems. "An iPhone 11, which has 4GB of RAM (32x what the first-gen model had), can run the operating system and display a current-day webpage that does a few useful things with JavaScript". This should sound like clearing a very low bar, but it doesn't seem to.
stronglikedan 1y ago
Mine open instantly, as long as I only have one open at a time. The power users on HN likely encounter a lot of slow loading apps, like I do.
Aurornis 1y ago
I can never tell if all of these comments are exaggerations to make a point, or if some people really have computers so slow that everything takes 20 seconds to launch (like the other comment claims). I'm sure some of these people are using 10 year old corporate laptops with heavy corporate anti-virus scanning, leading to slow startup times. However, I think a lot of people are just exaggerating. If it's not instantly open, it's too long for them. I, too, can get programs like Slack and Visual Studio Code to launch in a couple seconds at most, in contrast to all of these comments claiming 20 second launch times. I also don't quit these programs, so the only time I see that load time is after an update or reboot. Even if every program did take 20 seconds to launch and I rebooted my computer once a week, the net time lost would be measured in a couple of minutes.
- vdqtp3 1y ago
  It's not an exaggeration. I have a 12 core Ryzen 9 with 64GB of RAM, and clicking the emoji reaction button in Signal takes long enough to render the fixed set of emojis that I've begun clicking the empty space where I know the correct emoji will appear. For years I've been hitting the Windows key, typing the three or four unique characters for the app I want and hitting enter, because the start menu takes too long to appear. As a side note, that no longer works since Microsoft decided that predictability isn't a valuable feature, and the list doesn't filter the same way every time or I get different results depending on how fast I type and hit enter. Lots of people literally outpace the fastest hardware on the market, and that is insane.
  - ryao 1y ago
    I have a 16 core Ryzen 9 with 128GB of RAM. I have not noticed any slowness in Signal. This might be caused by differences in our operating systems. It sounds like you run Windows. I run Gentoo Linux.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    > It's not an exaggeration. The comment I quoted was about 20 second load times, not a slight delay before something is clickable. That's the exaggeration. FWIW, I don't see the same slowness in Signal, like the other poster.
dijit 1y ago
You're a pretty bad sample, that machine you're talking about probably cost >$2,000 new; and if it's an M-series chip; well that was a multi-generational improvement. I (very recently I might add) used a Razer Blade 18, with i9 13950HX and 64G of DDR5 memory, and it felt awfully slow, not sure how much of that is Windows 11's fault however. My daily driver is an M2 Macbook Air (or a Threadripper 3970x running linux); but the workers in my office? Dell Latitudes with an i5, 4 real cores and 16G of RAM if they're lucky... and of course, Windows 11. Don't even ask what my mum uses at home, it cost less than my monthly food bill; and that's pretty normal for people who don't love computers.
nsagent 1y ago
It really depends on the software. I have the top-of-the-line M4 Max laptop with 128GB of memory. I recently switched from Zotero [1] to using papis [2] at the command line. Zotero would take 30 seconds to a minute to start up. papis has no startup time as it's a cli app and searching is nearly instantaneous. There is no reason for Zotero to be so slow. In fact, before switching I had to cut down on the number of papers it was managing because at one point it stopped loading altogether. It's great you haven't run into poorly optimized software, but but not everyone is so lucky. [1]: https://www.zotero.org/ https://www.zotero.org/ [2]: https://github.com/papis/papis https://github.com/papis/papis
agilob 1y ago
Watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U
ryao 1y ago
You live in the UNIX world, where this insanity is far less prevalent. Here is an example of what you are missing: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2651749/office-is-too-slow-so-microsoft-is-making-it-load-at-windows-startup.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2651749/office-is-too-slow-s...
xlii 1y ago
It really depends at what you look. You say snappy, but what is snappy? I right now have a toy project in progress in zig that uses users perception as a core concept. Rarely one can react to 10ms jank. But when you get to bare metal development 10ms becomes 10 million of reasonably high level instructions that can be done. Now go to website, click. If you can sense a delay from JS this means that jank is approximately 100ms; does clicking that button, really should be 100 million instructions? When you look close enough you will find that not only it’s 100 million instructions but your operating system along with processor made tens of thousands of tricks in the background to minimize the jank and yet you still can sense it. Today even writing in non optimized, unpopular languages like Prolog is viable because hardware is mindblowing fast, and yet some things are slow, because we utilize that speed to decrease development costs.
nwallin 1y ago
The proliferation of Electron apps is one of the main things. Discord, Teams, Slack, all dogshit slow. Uses over a gigabyte of RAM, and uses it poorly. There's a noticeable pause any time you do user input; type a character, click a button, whatever it is, it always takes just barely too long. All of Microsoft's suite is garbage. Outlook, Visual Studio, OneNote. Edge isn't slow, (shockingly) but you know what is? Every webpage. The average web page has 200 dependencies it needs to load--frameworks, ads, libraries, spyware--and each of those dependencies has a 99% latency of 2 seconds, which means on average, at least two of those dependencies takes 2 seconds to load, and the page won't load until they do. Steam is slow as balls. It's 2025 and it's a 32 bit application for some reason. At my day job, our users complain that our desktop application is slow. It is slow. We talk about performance a lot and how it will be a priority and it's important. Every release, we get tons of new features, and the software gets slower. My shit? My shit's fast. My own tiny little fiefdom in this giant rat warrens is fast. It could be faster, but it's pretty fast. It's not embarrassing. When I look at a flamegraph of our code when my code is running, I really have to dig in to find where my code is taking up time. It's fine. I'm--I don't feel bad. It's fine. I love this industry. We are so smart. We are so capable of so many amazing things. But this industry annoys me. We so rarely do any of them. We're given a problem, and the solution is some god forsaken abomination of an electron app running javascript code on the desktop and pumping bytes into and out of a fucking DOM. The most innovative shit we can come up with is inventing a virtual dumbass and putting it into everything. The most value we create is division, hate, fear, and loathing on social media. I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed.
jeroenhd 1y ago
Your 2021 MacBook and 2020 iPhone are top of the line devices. They'll be fine. Buy something for half that price or less, like most people would be able to, and see if you can still get the same results. This is also why I'd recommend people with lower budgets to buy high-end second hand rather than recent mid/low tier hardware.
computerthings 1y ago
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Mr_Minderbinder 1y ago
I notice a pattern in the kinds of software that people are complaining about. They tend to be user-facing interactive software that is either corporate, proprietary, SaaS, “late-stage” or contains large amounts of telemetry. Since I tend to avoid such software, the vast majority of software I use I have no complaints about with respect to speed and responsiveness. The biggest piece of corporate bloatware I have is Chromium which (only) takes 1-2 seconds to launch and my system is not particularly powerful. In the corporate world bloat is a proxy for sophistication, for them it is a desirable feature so you should expect it. They would rather you use several JavaScript frameworks when the job could be done with plain HTML because it shows how rich/important/fashionable/relevant/high-tech they are.
sidewndr46 1y ago
I obviously don't know anything about you, but if you used computers in the 486 & Pentium era most operations were instant. There were few things that took enough time to visually notice them happen, even in graphical interfaces. I remember even later in the Pentium III era trying to benchmark different practical operations and coming to the conclusion that when it takes less than 1 second to do most things, my benchmarks weren't worth much at all.

mjburgess 1y ago

People conflat the insanity of running a network cable through every application with the poor performance of their computers.

sgarland 1y ago
Correction: devs have made the mistake of turning everything into remote calls, without having any understanding as to the performance implications of doing so. Sonos’ app is a perfect example of this. The old app controlled everything locally, since the speakers set up their own wireless mesh network. This worked fantastically well. Someone at Sonos got the bright idea to completely rewrite the app such that it wasn’t even backwards-compatible with older hardware, and everything is now a remote calls. Changing volume? Phone —> Router —> WAN —> Cloud —> Router —> Speakers. Just… WHY. This failed so spectacularly that the CEO responsible stepped down / was forced out, and the new one claims that fixing the app is his top priority. We’ll see.
- mjburgess 1y ago
  Presumably they wanted the telemetry. It's not clear that this was a dev-initiated switch. Perhaps we can blame the 'statistical monetization' policies of adtech and then AI for all this -- i'm not entirely sold on developers. What, after all, is the difference between an `/etc/hosts` set of loop'd records vs. an ISP's dns -- as far as the software goes?
  - sgarland 1y ago
    You’re right, and I shouldn’t necessarily blame devs for the idea, though I do blame their CTO for not standing up to it if nothing else. Though it’s also unclear to me in this particular case why they couldn’t collect commands being issued, and then batch-send them hourly, daily, etc. instead of having each one route through the cloud.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    > Presumably they wanted the telemetry Why not log them to a file and cron a script to upload the data? Even if the feature request is nonsensical, you can architect a solution that respect the platform's constraints. It's kinda like when people drag in React and Next.js just to have a static website.
    - arolihas 1y ago
      someone out there now has a cool resume line item about doing real time cloud microservices on the edge
- LocalPCGuy 1y ago
  We (probably) can guess the why - tracking and data opportunities which companies can eventually sell or utilize for profit is some way.

sorcerer-mar 1y ago

I think it's a very theoretical argument: we could of course theoretically make everything even faster. It's nowhere near the most optimal use of the available hardware. All we'd have to give up is squishy hard-to-measure things like "feature sets" and "engineering velocity."

Cthulhu_ 1y ago
> All we'd have to give up is squishy hard-to-measure things like "feature sets" and "engineering velocity." Would we? Really? I don't think giving up performance needs to be a compromise for the number of features or speed of delivering them.
- sorcerer-mar 1y ago
  People make higher-order abstractions for funzies?
CyberDildonics 1y ago
we could of course theoretically make everything even faster. It's nowhere near the most optimal use of the available hardware. All we'd have to give up is squishy hard-to-measure things like "feature sets" and "engineering velocity." Says who? Who are these experienced people that know how to write fast software that think it is such a huge sacrifice? The reality is that people who say things like this don't actually know much about writing fast software because it really isn't that difficult. You just can't grab electron and the lastest javascript react framework craze. These kinds of myths get perpetuated by people who repeat it without having experienced the side of just writing native software. I think mostly it is people rationalizing not learning C++ and sticking to javascript or python because that's what they learned first.
- sorcerer-mar 1y ago
  > These kinds of myths get perpetuated by people who repeat it without having experienced the side of just writing native software. I think mostly it is people rationalizing not learning assembly and sticking to C++ or PERL because that's what they learned first. Why stop at C++? Is that what you happen to be comfortable with? Couldn't you create even faster software if you went down another level? Why don't you?

high_na_euv 1y ago

Yup, people run software on shitty computers and blame all the software. The only slow (local) software I know is llvm and cpp compilers Other are pretty fast

maleldil 1y ago
You have stories of people running 2021 MacBooks and complaining about performance. Those are not shitty computers.

flohofwoe 1y ago

I guess you don't need to wrestle with Xcode? Somehow the Xcode team managed to make startup and some features in newer Xcode versions slower than older Xcode versions running on old Intel Macs. E.g. the ARM Macs are a perfect illustration that software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. After a very short 'free lunch' right after the Intel => ARM transition we're now back to the same old software performance regression spiral (e.g. new software will only be optimized until it feels 'fast enough', and that 'fast enough' duration is the same no matter how fast the hardware is). Another excellent example is the recent release of the Oblivion Remaster on Steam (which uses the brand new UE5 engine): On my somewhat medium-level PC I have to reduce the graphics quality in the Oblivion Remaster so much that the result looks worse than 14-year old Skyrim (especially outdoor environments), and that doesn't even result in a stable 60Hz frame rate, while Skyrim runs at a rock-solid 60Hz and looks objectively better in the outdoors. E.g. even though the old Skyrim engine isn't by far as technologically advanced as UE5 and had plenty of performance issues at launch on a ca. 2010 PC, the Oblivion Remaster (which uses a "state of the art" engine) looks and performs worse than its own 14 years old predecessor. I'm sure the UE5-based Oblivion remaster can be properly optimized to beat Skyrim both in looks and performance, but apparently nobody cared about that during development.

jayd16 1y ago
You're comparing the art(!) of two different games, that targeted two different sets of hardware while using the ideal hardware for one and not the other. Kind of a terrible example.
- flohofwoe 1y ago
  > You're comparing the art(!) The art direction, modelling and animation work is mostly fine, the worse look results from the lack of dynamic lighting and ambient occlusion in the Oblivion Remaster when switching Lumen (UE5's realtime global illumination feature) to the lowest setting, this results in completely flat lighting for the vegetation but is needed to get an acceptable base frame rate (it doesn't solve the random stuttering though). Basically, the best art will always look bad without good lighting (and even baked or faked ambient lighting like in Skyrim looks better than no ambient lighting at all. Digital Foundry has an excellent video about the issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0rCA1vpgSw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0rCA1vpgSw TL;DR: the 'ideal hardware' for the Oblivion Remaster doesn't exist, even if you get the best gaming rig money can buy.

mschild 1y ago

A mix of both. There are large number of websites that are inefficiently written using up unnecessary amounts of resources. Semi-modern devices make up for that by just having a massive amount of computing power. However, you also need to consider 2 additional factors. Macbooks and iPhones, even 4 year old ones, have usually been at the upper end of the scale for processing power. (When compared to the general mass-market of private end-consumer devices) Try doing the same on a 4 year old 400 Euro laptop and it might look a bit different. Also consider your connection speed and latency. I usually have no loading issue either. But I have a 1G fiber connection. My parents don't.

_aavaa_ 1y ago

I'd wager that a 2021 MacBook, like the one I have, is stronger than the laptop used by majority of people in the world. Life on an entry or even mid level windows laptop is a very different world.

josephg 1y ago
Yep. Developers make programs run well enough on the hardware sitting on our desks. So long as we’re well paid (and have decent computers ourselves), we have no idea what the average computing experience is for people still running 10yo computers which were slow even for the day. And that keeps the treadmill going. We make everyone need to upgrade every few years. A few years ago I accidentally left my laptop at work on a Friday afternoon. Instead of going into the office, I pulled out a first generation raspberry pi and got everything set up on that. Needless to say, our nodejs app started pretty slowly. Not for any good reason - there were a couple modules which pulled in huge amounts of code which we didn’t use anyway. A couple hours work made the whole app start 5x faster and use half the ram. I would never have noticed that was a problem with my snappy desktop.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  > Yep. Developers make programs run well enough on the hardware sitting on our desks. So long as we’re well paid (and have decent computers ourselves), we have no idea what the average computing experience is for people still running 10yo computers which were slow even for the day. And that keeps the treadmill going. We make everyone need to upgrade every few years. Same thing happens with UI & Website design. When the designers and front-end devs all have top-spec MacBooks, with 4k+ displays, they design to look good in that environment. Then you ship to the rest of the world which are still for the most part on 16:9 1920x1080 (or god forbid, 1366x768), low spec windows laptops and the UI looks like shit and is borderline unstable. Now I don't necessarily think things should be designed for the lowest common denominator, but at the very least we should be taking into consideration that the majority of users probably don't have super high end machines or displays. Even today you can buy a brand new "budget" windows laptop that'll come with 8GB of RAM, and a tiny 1920x1080 display, with poor color reproduction and crazy low brightness - and that's what the majority of people are using, if they are using a computer at all and not a phone or tablet.

tjader 1y ago

I just clicked on the network icon next to the clock on a Windows 11 laptop. A gray box appeared immediately, about one second later all the buttons for wifi, bluetooth, etc appeared. Windows is full of situations like this, that require no network calls, but still take over one second to render.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago
It's strange, it visibly loading the buttons is indicative they use async technology that can use multithreaded CPUs effectively... but it's slower than the old synchronous UI stuff. I'm sure it's significantly more expensive to render than Windows 3.11 - XP were - rounded corners and scalable vector graphics instead of bitmaps or whatever - but surely not that much? And the resulting graphics can be cached.
- vel0city 1y ago
  Windows 3.1 wasn't checking WiFi, Bluetooth, energy saving profile, night light setting, audio devices, current power status and battery level, audio devices, and more when clicking the non-existent icon on the non-existent taskbar. Windows XP didn't have this quick setting area at all. But I do recall having the volume slider take a second to render on XP from time to time, and that was only rendering a slider. And FWIW this stuff is then cached. I hadn't clicked that setting area in a while (maybe the first time this boot?) and did get a brief gray box that then a second later populated with all the buttons and settings. Now every time I click it again it appears instantly.
  - tjader 1y ago
    But is this cache trustworthy or will it eventually lead you to click in the wrong place because the situation changed and now there's a new button making everything change place? And even if every information takes a bit to figure out, it doesn't excuse taking a second to even draw the UI. If checking bluetooth takes a second, then draw the button immediately but disable interaction and show a loading icon, and when you get the blutooth information update the button, and so on for everything else.

subjectsigma 1y ago

I have a 2019 Intel MacBook and Outlook takes about five seconds to load and constantly sputters

CelestialMystic 1y ago

You are using a relatively high end computer and mobile device. Go and find a cheap laptop x86 and try doing the same. It will be extremely painful. Most of this is due to a combination of Windows 11 being absolute trash and JavaScript being used extensively in applications/websites. JavaScript is memory hog and can be extremely slow depending on how it is written (how you deal with loops massively affects the performance). What is frustrating though that until relatively recently these devices would work fine with JS heavy apps and work really well with anything that is using a native toolkit.

g-mork 1y ago

Lightroom non-user detected

alnwlsn 1y ago

It depends. Can Windows 3.11 be faster than Windows 11? Sure, maybe even in most cases: https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html

xnorswap 1y ago

It vastly depends on what software you're forced to use. Here's some software I use all the time, which feels horribly slow, even on a new laptop: Slack. Switching channels on slack, even when you've just switched so it's all cached, is painfully slow. I don't know if they build in a 200ms or so delay deliberately to mask when it's not cached, or whether it's some background rendering, or what it is, but it just feels sluggish. Outlook Opening an email gives a spinner before it's opened. Emails are about as lightweight as it gets, yet you get a spinner. It's "only" about 200ms, but that's still 200ms of waiting for an email to open. Plain text emails were faster 25 years ago. Adding a subset of HTML shouldn't have caused such a massive regression. Teams Switching tabs on teams has the same delayed feeling as Slack. Every iteraction feels like it's waiting 50-100ms before actioning. Clicking an empty calendar slot to book a new event gives 30-50ms of what I've mentally internalised as "Electron blank-screen" but there's probably a real name out there for basically waiting for a new dialog/screen to even have a chrome, let alone content. Creating a new calendar event should be instant, it should not take 300-500ms or so of waiting for the options to render. These are basic "productivity" tools in which every single interaction feels like it's gated behind at least a 50ms debounce waiting period, with often extra waiting for content on top. Is the root cause network hops or telemetry? Is it some corporate antivirus stealing the computer's soul? Ultimately the root cause doesn't actually matter, because no matter the cause, it still feels like I'm wading through treacle trying to interact with my computer.

maccard 1y ago
I’d take 50ms but in my experience it’s more like 250.
- xnorswap 1y ago
  You're probably right, I'm likely massively underestimating the time, it's long enough to be noticable, but not so long that it feels instantly frustrating the first time, it just contributes to an overall sluggishness.
vel0city 1y ago
I don't get any kind of spinner on Outlook opening emails. Especially emails which are pure text or only lightly stylized open instantly. Even emails with calendar invites load really fast, I don't see any kind of spinner graphic at all. Running latest Outlook on Windows 11, currently >1k emails in my Inbox folder, on an 11th gen i5, while also on a Teams call a ton of other things active on my machine. This is also a machine with a lot of corporate security tools sapping a lot of cycles.

makeitdouble 1y ago

To note, people will have wildly different tolerance to delays and lag. On the extreme, my retired parents don't feel the difference between 5s or 1s when loading a window or clicking somewhere. I offered a switch to a new laptop, cloning their data, and they didn't give a damn and just opened the laptop the closest to them. Most people aren't that desensitized, but for some a 600ms delay is instantaneous when for other it's 500ms too slow.

maccard 1y ago

Slack, teams, vs code, miro, excel, rider/intellij, outlook, photoshop/affinity are all applications I use every day that take 20+ seconds to launch. My corporate VPN app takes 30 seconds to go from a blank screen to deciding if it’s going to prompt me for credentials or remember my login, every morning. This is on an i9 with 64GB ram, and 1GN fiber. On the website front - Facebook, twitter, Airbnb, Reddit, most news sites, all take 10+ seconds to load or be functional, and their core functionality has regressed significantly in the last decade. I’m not talking about features that I prefer, but as an example if you load two links in Reddit in two different tabs my experience has been that it’s 50/50 if they’ll actually both load or if one gets stuck either way skeletons.

aloha2436 1y ago
I'm on a four year old mid-tier laptop and opening VS Code takes maybe five seconds. Opening IDEA takes five seconds. Opening twitter on an empty cache takes perhaps four seconds and I believe I am a long way from their servers. On my work machine slack takes five seconds, IDEA is pretty close to instant, the corporate VPN starts nearly instantly (although the Okta process seems unnecessarily slow I'll admit), and most of the sites I use day-to-day (after Okta) are essentially instant to load. I would say that your experiences are not universal, although snappiness was the reason I moved to apple silicon macs in the first place. Perhaps Intel is to blame.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  VS Code defers a lot of tasks to the background at least. This is a bit more visible in intellij; you seem to measure how long it takes to show its window, but how long does it take for it to warm up and finish indexing / loading everything, or before it actually becomes responsive? Anyway, five seconds is long for a text editor; 10, 15 years ago, sublime text loaded and opened up a file in <1 second, and it still does today. Vim and co are instant. Also keep in mind that desktop computers haven't gotten significantly faster for tasks like opening applications in the past years; they're more efficient (especially the M line CPUs) and have more hardware for specialist workloads like what they call AI nowadays, but not much innovation in application loading. You use a lot of words like "pretty close to", "nearly", "essentially", but 10, 20 years ago they WERE instant; applications from 10, 20 years ago should be so much faster today than they were on hardware from back then. I wish the big desktop app builders would invest in native applications. I understand why they go for web technology (it's the crossplatform GUI technology that Java and co promised and offers the most advanced styling of anything anywhere ever), but I wish they invested in it to bring it up to date.

viraptor 1y ago

What timescale are we talking about? Many DOS stock and accounting applications were basically instantaneous. There are some animations on iPhone that you can't disable that take longer than a series of keyboard actions of a skilled operator in the 90s. Windows 2k with a stripped shell was way more responsive that today's systems as long as you didn't need to hit the harddrives. The "instant" today is really laggy compared to what we had. Opening Slack takes 5s on a flagship phone and opening a channel which I just had open and should be fully cached takes another 2s. When you type in JIRA the text entry lags and all the text on the page blinks just a tiny bit (full redraw). When pages load on non-flagship phones (i.e. most of the world), they lag a lot, which I can see on monitoring dashboards.

sgarland 1y ago

I’m sure you know this, but a reminder that modern devices cache a hell of a lot, even when you “quit” such that subsequent launches are faster. Such is the benefit of more RAM. I could compare Slack to, say, HexChat (or any other IRC client). And yeah, it’s an unfair comparison in many ways – Slack has far more capabilities. But from another perspective, how many of them do you immediately need at launch? Surely the video calling code could be delayed until after the main client is up, etc. (and maybe it is, in which case, oh dear). A better example is Visual Studio [0], since it’s apples to apples. [0]: https://youtu.be/MR4i3Ho9zZY https://youtu.be/MR4i3Ho9zZY

anthk 1y ago
Compare it to qutecom, or any other xmpp client.

lenkite 1y ago

2021 MacBook and 2020 iPhone are not "old". Still using 2018 iPhone. Used a 2021 Macbook until a month ago.

api 1y ago

They're comparing these applications to older applications that loaded instantly on much slower computers. Both sides are right. There is a ton of waste and bloat and inefficiency. But there's also a ton of stuff that genuinely does demand more memory and CPU. An incomplete list: - Higher DPI displays use intrinsically more memory and CPU to paint and rasterize. My monitor's pixel array uses 4-6X more memory than my late 90s PC had in the entire machine. - Better font rendering is the same. - Today's UIs support Unicode, right to left text, accessibility features, different themes (dark/light at a minimum), dynamic scaling, animations, etc. A modern GUI engine is similar in difficulty to a modern game engine. - Encryption everywhere means that protocols are no longer just opening a TCP connection but require negotiation of state and running ciphers. - The Web is an incredibly rich presentation platform that comes with the overhead of an incredibly rich presentation platform. It's like PostScript meets a GUI library meets a small OS meets a document markup layer meets... - The data sets we deal with today are often a lot larger. - Some of what we've had to do to get 1000X performance itself demands more overhead: multiple cores, multiple threads, 64 bit addressing, sophisticated MMUs, multiple levels of cache, and memory layouts optimized for performance over compactness. Those older machines were single threaded machines with much more minimal OSes, memory managers, etc. - More memory means more data structure overhead to manage that memory. - Larger disks also demand larger structures to manage them, and modern filesystems have all kinds of useful features like journaling and snapshots that also add overhead. ... and so on.

skydhash 1y ago
Then you install Linux and get all that without the mess that is Win11. Inefficient software is inefficient software.

afavour 1y ago

I think it’s a little more nuanced than the broad takes make it seem. One of the biggest performance issues I witness is that everyone assumes a super fast, always on WiFi/5G connection. Very little is cached locally on device so even if I want to do a very simple search through my email inbox I have to wait on network latency. Sometimes that’s great, often it really isn’t. Same goes for many SPA web apps. It’s not that my phone can’t process the JS (even though there’s way too much of it), it’s poor caching strategies that mean I’m downloading and processing >1MB of JS way more often than I should be. Even on a super fast connection that delay is noticeable.

jayd16 1y ago

A lot of nostalgia is at work here. Modern tech is amazing. If the old tools were actually better people would actually use them. Its not like you can't get them to work.

ryao 1y ago
As a regular user of vim, tmux and cscope for programming in C, may I say that not only do I prefer the old tools, but I use them regularly.

mbac32768 1y ago

In Carmack's Lex Fridman interview he says he knows C++ devs who still insist on using some ancient version of MSVC because it's *so fast* compared to the latest, on the latest hardware.

OtherShrezzing 1y ago

Spotify takes 7 seconds from clicking on its icon to playing a song on a 2024 top-of-the-range MacBook Pro. Navigating through albums saved on your computer can take several seconds. Double clicking on a song creates a 1/4sec pause. This is absolutely remarkable inefficiency considering the application's core functionality (media players) was perfected a quarter century ago.

everdrive 1y ago
And on RhythmBox, on a 2017 laptop it works instantaneously. These big monetized apps were a huge mistake.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  > These big monetized apps were a huge mistake. It's electron. Electron was a mistake.

asciimov 1y ago

One example is Office. Microsoft is going back to preloading office during Windows Boot so that you don't notice it loading. With the average system spec 25 years ago it made sense to preload office. But today, what is Office doing that it needs to offload its startup to running at boot?

yifanl 1y ago

The Nintendo Switch on a chipset that was outdated a decade ago can run Tears of the Kingdom. It's not sensible that modern hardware is anything less than instant.

astrange 1y ago
That's because TOTK is designed to run on it, with careful compromises and a lot of manual tuning. Nintendo comes up with a working game first and then adds the story - BotW/TotK are post-apocalyptic so they don't have to show you too many people on screen at once. The other way you can tell this is that both games have the same story even though one is a sequel! Like Ganon takes over the castle/Hyrule and then Link defeats him, but then they go into the basement and somehow Ganon is there again and does the exact same thing again? Makes no sense.
- Thedarkb 1y ago
  The framing device for The Legend of Zelda games is that it's a mythological cycle in which Link, Ganon, and Zelda are periodically reborn and the plot begins anew with new characters. It lets them be flexible with the setting, side quests, and characters as the series progresses and it's been selling games for just shy of forty years.
  - astrange 1y ago
    ToTK is a direct sequel to BoTW set a few years later and supposedly starring literally the same people though.
- yifanl 1y ago
  > That's because TOTK is designed to run on it, with careful compromises and a lot of manual tuning. Should I draw from this conclusion that modern software is not designed to run on modern hardware?
  - astrange 1y ago
    Indeed it isn't. That's hard when everything is fighting against it. Nintendo can do it because they only have one hardware target (unlike multiplatform games) and they can spend an extra year or two doing performance work.

andy12_ 1y ago

Online Word (or Microsoft 365, or whatever it is called) regularly took me 2 minutes to load a 120 page document. I'm being very literal here. You could see it load in real time approximately 1 page a second. And it wasn't a network issue, mind you. It was just that slow. Worse, the document strained my laptop so much as I used it, I regularly had to reload the web-page.

joaohaas 1y ago

Try forcefully closing VSCode and your browser, and see how long it takes to open them again. The same is true for most complex webpages/'webapps' (Slack, Discord, etc). A lot of other native Mac stuff is also less than ideal. Terminal keeps getting stuck all the time, Mail app can take a while to render HTML emails, Xcode is Xcode, and so on.

bjourne 1y ago

Apple unlike the other Silicon Valley giants has figured out that latency >>> throughput. Minimizing latency is much more important for making a program "feel" fast than maximizing latency. Some of the apps I interact with daily are Slack, Teams (ugh), Gmail, and YouTube and they are all slow as dogshit.

KapKap66 1y ago

There's a problem when people who aren't very sensitive to latency and try and track it, and that is that their perception of what "instant" actually means is wrong. For them, instant is like, one second. For someone who cares about latency, instant is less than 10 milliseconds, or whatever threshold makes the difference between input and result imperceptible. People have the same problem judging video game framerates because they don't compare them back to back very often (there are perceptual differences between framerates of 30, 60, 120, 300, and 500, at the minimum, even on displays incapable of refreshing at these higher speeds), but you'll often hear people say that 60 fps is "silky smooth," which is not true whatsoever lol. If you haven't compared high and low latency directly next to each other then there are good odds that you don't know what it looks like. There was a twitter video from awhile ago that did a good job showing it off that's one of the replies to the OP. It's here: https://x.com/jmmv/status/1671670996921896960 https://x.com/jmmv/status/1671670996921896960 Sorry if I'm too presumptuous, however; you might be completely correct and instant is instant in your case.

JoeAltmaier 1y ago
I fear that such comments are similar to the old 'a monster cable makes my digital audio sound more mellow!' The eye percieves at about 10 hz. That's 100ms per capture. All the rest, I'd have to see a study that shows how any higher framerate can possibly be perceived or useful.
- zahlman 1y ago
  >The eye percieves at about 10 hz. That's 100ms per capture. All the rest, I'd have to see a study that shows how any higher framerate can possibly be perceived or useful. It takes effectively no effort to conduct such a study yourself. Just try re-encoding a video at different frame rates up to your monitor refresh rate. Or try looking at a monitor that has a higher refresh rate than the one you normally use.
- KapKap66 1y ago
  Well if you believe that, start up a video game with a framerate limiter and set your game's framerate limit to 10 fps and tell me how much you enjoy the experience. By default your game will likely be running at either 60 fps or 120 fps if you're vertical synced (depends on your monitor's refresh rate). Make sure to switch back and forth between 10 and 60/120 to compare. Even your average movie captures at 24 hz. Again, very likely you've never actually just compared these things for yourself back to back, as I mentioned originally.

zahlman 1y ago

How long did your computer take to start up, from power off (and no hibernation, although that presumably wasn't a thing yet), the first time you got to use a computer? How long did it take the last time you had to use an HDD rather than SSD for your primary drive? How long did it take the first time you got to use an SSD? How long does it take today? Did literally anything other than the drive technology ever make a significant difference in that, in the last 40 years? > Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook Instantly? Your applications don't have splash screens? I think you've probably just gotten used to however long it does take. > 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems. "An iPhone 11, which has 4GB of RAM (32x what the first-gen model had), can run the operating system and display a current-day webpage that does a few useful things with JavaScript". This should sound like clearing a very low bar, but it doesn't seem to.

stronglikedan 1y ago

Mine open instantly, as long as I only have one open at a time. The power users on HN likely encounter a lot of slow loading apps, like I do.

Aurornis 1y ago

I can never tell if all of these comments are exaggerations to make a point, or if some people really have computers so slow that everything takes 20 seconds to launch (like the other comment claims). I'm sure some of these people are using 10 year old corporate laptops with heavy corporate anti-virus scanning, leading to slow startup times. However, I think a lot of people are just exaggerating. If it's not instantly open, it's too long for them. I, too, can get programs like Slack and Visual Studio Code to launch in a couple seconds at most, in contrast to all of these comments claiming 20 second launch times. I also don't quit these programs, so the only time I see that load time is after an update or reboot. Even if every program did take 20 seconds to launch and I rebooted my computer once a week, the net time lost would be measured in a couple of minutes.

vdqtp3 1y ago
It's not an exaggeration. I have a 12 core Ryzen 9 with 64GB of RAM, and clicking the emoji reaction button in Signal takes long enough to render the fixed set of emojis that I've begun clicking the empty space where I know the correct emoji will appear. For years I've been hitting the Windows key, typing the three or four unique characters for the app I want and hitting enter, because the start menu takes too long to appear. As a side note, that no longer works since Microsoft decided that predictability isn't a valuable feature, and the list doesn't filter the same way every time or I get different results depending on how fast I type and hit enter. Lots of people literally outpace the fastest hardware on the market, and that is insane.
- ryao 1y ago
  I have a 16 core Ryzen 9 with 128GB of RAM. I have not noticed any slowness in Signal. This might be caused by differences in our operating systems. It sounds like you run Windows. I run Gentoo Linux.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > It's not an exaggeration. The comment I quoted was about 20 second load times, not a slight delay before something is clickable. That's the exaggeration. FWIW, I don't see the same slowness in Signal, like the other poster.

dijit 1y ago

You're a pretty bad sample, that machine you're talking about probably cost >$2,000 new; and if it's an M-series chip; well that was a multi-generational improvement. I (very recently I might add) used a Razer Blade 18, with i9 13950HX and 64G of DDR5 memory, and it felt awfully slow, not sure how much of that is Windows 11's fault however. My daily driver is an M2 Macbook Air (or a Threadripper 3970x running linux); but the workers in my office? Dell Latitudes with an i5, 4 real cores and 16G of RAM if they're lucky... and of course, Windows 11. Don't even ask what my mum uses at home, it cost less than my monthly food bill; and that's pretty normal for people who don't love computers.

nsagent 1y ago

It really depends on the software. I have the top-of-the-line M4 Max laptop with 128GB of memory. I recently switched from Zotero [1] to using papis [2] at the command line. Zotero would take 30 seconds to a minute to start up. papis has no startup time as it's a cli app and searching is nearly instantaneous. There is no reason for Zotero to be so slow. In fact, before switching I had to cut down on the number of papers it was managing because at one point it stopped loading altogether. It's great you haven't run into poorly optimized software, but but not everyone is so lucky. [1]: https://www.zotero.org/ https://www.zotero.org/ [2]: https://github.com/papis/papis https://github.com/papis/papis

agilob 1y ago

Watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U

ryao 1y ago

You live in the UNIX world, where this insanity is far less prevalent. Here is an example of what you are missing: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2651749/office-is-too-slow-so-microsoft-is-making-it-load-at-windows-startup.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2651749/office-is-too-slow-s...

xlii 1y ago

It really depends at what you look. You say snappy, but what is snappy? I right now have a toy project in progress in zig that uses users perception as a core concept. Rarely one can react to 10ms jank. But when you get to bare metal development 10ms becomes 10 million of reasonably high level instructions that can be done. Now go to website, click. If you can sense a delay from JS this means that jank is approximately 100ms; does clicking that button, really should be 100 million instructions? When you look close enough you will find that not only it’s 100 million instructions but your operating system along with processor made tens of thousands of tricks in the background to minimize the jank and yet you still can sense it. Today even writing in non optimized, unpopular languages like Prolog is viable because hardware is mindblowing fast, and yet some things are slow, because we utilize that speed to decrease development costs.

nwallin 1y ago

The proliferation of Electron apps is one of the main things. Discord, Teams, Slack, all dogshit slow. Uses over a gigabyte of RAM, and uses it poorly. There's a noticeable pause any time you do user input; type a character, click a button, whatever it is, it always takes just barely too long. All of Microsoft's suite is garbage. Outlook, Visual Studio, OneNote. Edge isn't slow, (shockingly) but you know what is? Every webpage. The average web page has 200 dependencies it needs to load--frameworks, ads, libraries, spyware--and each of those dependencies has a 99% latency of 2 seconds, which means on average, at least two of those dependencies takes 2 seconds to load, and the page won't load until they do. Steam is slow as balls. It's 2025 and it's a 32 bit application for some reason. At my day job, our users complain that our desktop application is slow. It is slow. We talk about performance a lot and how it will be a priority and it's important. Every release, we get tons of new features, and the software gets slower. My shit? My shit's fast. My own tiny little fiefdom in this giant rat warrens is fast. It could be faster, but it's pretty fast. It's not embarrassing. When I look at a flamegraph of our code when my code is running, I really have to dig in to find where my code is taking up time. It's fine. I'm--I don't feel bad. It's fine. I love this industry. We are so smart. We are so capable of so many amazing things. But this industry annoys me. We so rarely do any of them. We're given a problem, and the solution is some god forsaken abomination of an electron app running javascript code on the desktop and pumping bytes into and out of a fucking DOM. The most innovative shit we can come up with is inventing a virtual dumbass and putting it into everything. The most value we create is division, hate, fear, and loathing on social media. I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed.

jeroenhd 1y ago

Your 2021 MacBook and 2020 iPhone are top of the line devices. They'll be fine. Buy something for half that price or less, like most people would be able to, and see if you can still get the same results. This is also why I'd recommend people with lower budgets to buy high-end second hand rather than recent mid/low tier hardware.

computerthings 1y ago

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Mr_Minderbinder 1y ago

I notice a pattern in the kinds of software that people are complaining about. They tend to be user-facing interactive software that is either corporate, proprietary, SaaS, “late-stage” or contains large amounts of telemetry. Since I tend to avoid such software, the vast majority of software I use I have no complaints about with respect to speed and responsiveness. The biggest piece of corporate bloatware I have is Chromium which (only) takes 1-2 seconds to launch and my system is not particularly powerful. In the corporate world bloat is a proxy for sophistication, for them it is a desirable feature so you should expect it. They would rather you use several JavaScript frameworks when the job could be done with plain HTML because it shows how rich/important/fashionable/relevant/high-tech they are.

sidewndr46 1y ago

I obviously don't know anything about you, but if you used computers in the 486 & Pentium era most operations were instant. There were few things that took enough time to visually notice them happen, even in graphical interfaces. I remember even later in the Pentium III era trying to benchmark different practical operations and coming to the conclusion that when it takes less than 1 second to do most things, my benchmarks weren't worth much at all.