It's more that we've introduced tons of layers between keypress and screen. This is very useful, but it introduces latency throughout the system. Figthing the latency while keeping the features means we have to adopt new techniques.
This website shows how input latency has become worse over the years [1]. On the bottom there are more references, such as a comparison between terminals and editors (not that you asked for that, but still).
Responsiveness / latency issues on mobile are literally driving me nuts.
Icons and links that move between the time my brains initiate the chain of events to press on something and the time my finger actually hits the target are causing me so much frustration :(
That goes beyond loss of productivity and is literally affecting my mental health.
UI latency has gotten horrendous, both desktop and web.
That is what people are experiencing - 500ms-3000ms delays for basic UI interactions (or more), frozen UI’s, jerky/laggy autocomplete and UI renders. Like the classic ‘button is a different button by the time you see the old button and click on it’.
On incredibly lightly loaded and overpowered hardware.
Everyone has been focused on some core algorithm, and completely ignoring the user experience. IMO.
Besides using 6x more memory (close to 500MB for my target game) and taking 3x to load, latency is noticeably worse to the point of it becoming a major annoyance during play.
Typing feels sluggish and there's obvious delay after hitting ENTER and waiting for input to be processed and results to be displayed.
Spatterlight feels instant.
Are these annoyances academic? Not for me.
Smartphones suffer from input latency too, though I’m unsure of the underlying cause (curious how iOS handles window/view drawing). It only seems to be getting worse, though I haven’t done tests on this. While each new model undoubtedly has better tech specs, the interface responsiveness doesn’t seem to improve.
Hopefully at some point actual click latency will be fixed in general after some dark decades.
Still incredible that a gameboy or an 80's computer with a CRT feels more responsive than most devices these days.
Bring back tactility. I'm convinced the choppiness and weird waits are actually psychologically stressing us out. That's why good keyboards + old low latency OS'es or typewriters are so soothing to use.
At least I know I'm not wearing nostalgia goggles when I remember my early days on my Windows 95, and how fast the input responses were. It definitely feels as if input latency has degraded.
In an application like Teams, the delay between striking a key on the keyboard and the corresponding glyph appearing on screen is comically bad - two orders of magnitude higher than performing the equivalent action on a computer from the early 1980s.
Right, I get that, my point is increases in 'keypress to character in terminal' latency don't warrant conclusions like "Almost every computer and mobile device that people buy today is slower than common models of computers from the 70s and 80s." Low-latency interaction is still there, it's just not in typing because typing is a less important mode of interaction.
You're confusing throughput with latency. Those old systems were objectively more responsive because the keyboard and mouse were tied directly to high-priority IRQs which were serviced in the OS. Now we have USB keyboards and mice, which go on the same IRQ lines as every other USB device, and even if the OS could service them specially, it doesn't. So keyboard and mouse events go on a queue of things to do: disk accesses, network packets, etc. And the whole system feels slower because of the time lag between you sending a command to the machine via kb or mouse, and the machine actually receiving it.
I didn't realize how bad input latency had gotten in general until recently when I needed to boot directly into a terminal. Sometimes I could swear the character appears on the screen before I even hit the key. It's a weird feeling, but I would like more of it.
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