I feel like nobody cares about responsiveness anymore. (If they ever did.) My TV takes 20 seconds from pushing the power button before it's ready to show a picture. My Bluetooth headset takes a couple of seconds after flipping the power switch before it actually powers on. My iPhone (and I'd really expect better from Apple!) often takes 5-10 seconds to respond to a press of the Home button.
All over the place, apps and devices get faster and faster, and take longer and longer to actually do what you tell them to do.
I largely agree with you. Its funny that "low feature" devices have such an instant response to input while modern devices running on processors that are thousands of times faster are slow and laggy as hell. The only major speedup I've noticed has come from advances in hardware tech - SSDs, faster RAM, GPUs, etc.
I feel like responsiveness, low-latency and high-performance especially when it comes to UI stuff is where it comes down to taste. Frankly most people are unlikely to be bothered by a laggy UI. This applies to programmers as well. IMO, the only people I would rely upon to write performant (consumer oriented) code primarily exist only in the games industry. I feel like being forced to "do more" on a hardware platform that is going to be static over the course of the next five years self-selects people who are good at saving cycles and extracting performance.
You can't expect a hardware company to write good software - All smart TV's and such are going to suck big time. The IoT is going to be a goldmine with outdated libraries, unpatched vulnerabilities and other goodies. But you should expect more from professional software developers. Unfortunately, I can't think of the a single Google product that I used that was "highly responsive". Certainly the ones that I use regularly - Chrome, Gmail, Maps, Search have consistently all gone downhill in terms of memory bloat, cpu consumption and responsiveness. I haven't used Android recently so I can't comment, but the last time I had an android phone it got replaced with an iPhone 4S within a week.
For real. It's more like a minute on my TV. And the response to the remote buttons is more sluggish than any computer system I've ever used.
Software developers are to blame. An accumulation of people calling code they don't understand, ignoring constant factors, depending on Moore's law, sacrificing performance to save a little bit of effort.
There is some more to it though, in that simplistic programming leads to do everything at once instead of only what needs to be done to get a response and relay information back.
I'd have to disagree on that.
I have a note 4, rooted, stock other than that, and I just tested from unlock to opening google music to hitting play, and it took mere seconds the whole way through.
I doubt this has anything to do with me rooting my phone, but I would also add that I have a large amount of applications installed on my phone, as well as several background processes that I run continuously.
Not only is my phone fast and responsive, but I have irregular services like complete Linux installer running Ubuntu for arm, pushbullet, tasker, unified remote, and servers ultimate pro. And when I hit play, it plays immediately, I've had lag before, but that was due to latency on the network and not the application itself.
Just a alternate point of view :)
TVs are digital had come with all sorts of other features that require processing. This used to be handled by "secretly" leaving them on all the time. This would waste a decent amount of power, and as brands seek better power ratings they actually turn off now. It's the price you pay for HD. I also suspect that in general Bluetooth headsets always had a similar startup latency.
I don't buy it. Nothing about "processing" or HD means it has to take twenty seconds to boot. It's the price you pay for TV programmers thinking a full-sized Linux counts as an embedded OS.
Given what I understand the power of the machine inside these TVs to be, there's no reason a large-enough Linux shouldn't boot in a few seconds.
The manufacturer could get even smarter and use something like CRIU [0], along with opportunistic hybrid suspend [1] to dramatically speed up start times.
[1] Which would work like this: A little while after you power your TV off, it suspends to RAM, and disk. If you power your TV on, the system TV restores its state from RAM. If AC power goes out, when AC power is restored and stable, the TV performs a background operation that uses the on-disk suspend image to get back to its hybrid suspend state.
The problem is that these features don't work out of the box. Any feature is going to be judged by whether the increased time-to-market and R&D cost is justified by additional sales. It's worth noting here that nobody buys TVs based on how quickly they turn on.
> The problem is that these features don't work out of the box.
What?
No feature works out of the box. Engineering effort has to be expended to make something work when designing and building any new product. Did you maybe misphrase what you were trying to say?
> It's worth noting here that nobody buys TVs based on how quickly they turn on.
[citation needed]
A big part of my criteria for purchasing a display device is device and control responsiveness.
My non-technical family members who care about TV made "time between the time you turn the thing on and time it becomes usable" their #3 priority when purchasing their second "smart TV". [0]
It's pretty clear that many (most?) techies are really disappointed in how shitty, slow, and poorly designed most "smart TVs" are.
[0] #1 Picture quality. #2 Overall value per dollar.
If we trusted our devices not to spy on us, it would be a useful feature for a Smart TV to start up but leave the screen off when it detects someone walking into the room, so that by the time they find the remote, sit down, and actually press the power button to turn it on, It just has to turn the screen on and appears to start instantly.
On the other hand, personal computers are tremendously more responsive than they used to be. Windows 98 was not fun to use once your computer had been on for a while.
All over the place, apps and devices get faster and faster, and take longer and longer to actually do what you tell them to do.
</rant>