The computers are faster, but the products are slower.
Is latency a new issue? No, in fact, in the days before transistors, television sets operated with vacuum tubes, which required a warming up period before they worked. It could be five or 10 seconds before the picture tube lit up after turning the set on, something which was sufficiently annoying that many manufacturers built a system called “instant on”, which was a major selling feature.
To achieve this, the TV manufacturers simply kept the tubes warm at all times, drawing considerable energy, but allowing the picture tube to light up immediately when viewers flipped the switch.
Why would manufacturers put such an energy wasting feature into a product just to save the user from five seconds of inconvenience? Because five seconds is an eternity when you’re waiting for something to happen. Latency matters, yet it is still with us. Why?
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Episode Transcript:
If you live anywhere in the Western world, you regularly use one of these: a commercial hand dryer. You also likely use one of these, positioned near that hand dryer: an automatic faucet. Both these devices replace manually actuated switches and valves with sensors which trigger when human hands are placed near them.
And if you live anywhere in the Western world, you’ve noticed something else too: these things frequently don’t work. Now I spend, unfortunately, way too much time in fast food restaurants and coffee shops to not notice this, but I have noticed two noteworthy characteristics: they’re frequently out of order, and when they do work, they suffer from terrible latency.
Latency is a serious issue in all microprocessor-driven consumer goods, and in my opinion, nothing like enough engineering is devoted to solving it. And it isn’t a new issue. In the days before transistors, television sets operated with vacuum tubes, which required a warming up period before they worked. It could be five or ten seconds before the picture tube lit up after turning the set on, something which was sufficiently annoying that many manufacturers built a system called “instant on”, which was a major selling feature.
To achieve this, the TV manufacturer simply kept the tubes warm at all times, drawing considerable energy, but allowing the picture tube to light up immediately when viewers flipped the switch. Why would manufacturers put such an energy wasting feature into a product just to save the user from five seconds of inconvenience?
Because five seconds is an eternity when you’re waiting for something to happen. Opening a faucet takes a second. Waving my hands around and underneath a faucet for five seconds waiting for it to recognize my hands is damned annoying. It’s the same when waiting that length of time with dripping hands under the dryer, compared to the instant gratification that comes from drawing a paper towel out of a dispenser. Now these are trivial examples, but we see this in software everywhere.
My father used a Compaq Deskpro 286, using DOS, with no graphical user interface. When he switched to early versions of Windows, he commented on how much it slowed him down. And almost every new iteration of common software has exactly that effect: it forces users to wait. That weight may be only six or seven hundred milliseconds compared to the previous version, but it’s noticeable, and on aggregate, it matters.
I’m starting to notice this effect in modern automobiles too. Electronically shifted automatic transmissions now have a noticeable lag before the drive engages, and there’s even some detectable latency in pushbutton starting.
I’m not saying I don’t like it. I’m saying I hate it. And I’ve heard the counterargument for years: it’s only half a second. It’s only two seconds. It isn’t long to wait. But a major part of the engineering of consumer goods, is to improve their performance generation after generation.
My 52-inch flat screen high-res LED TV should be able to show me Aaron Rodgers leading the Jets faster than my late father saw Joe Namath, on the family 26-inch Zenith.
