Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

It blows my mind how unresponsive modern tech is, and it frustrates me constantly. What makes it even worse is how unpredictable the lags are so you can't even train yourself around it.

I was watching Halt and Catch Fire and in the first season the engineering team makes a great effort to meet something called the "Doherty Threshold" to keep the responsiveness of the machine so the user doesn't get frustrated and lose interest. I guess that is lost to time!

Even worse is the new trend of web pages optimizing for page load time. You wind up with a page that loads "instantly" but has almost none of the data you need displayed. Instead there are 2 or 3 AJAX requests to load the data & populate the DOM. Each one results in a repaint, wasting CPU and causing the page content to move around.

There was a small accordion in some Google search results that opened around ~1 second after the results page was loaded and I think it was the most infuriating thing ever. And we are talking about Google here.

The one where you would go to click on the first result and it would expand seemingly perfectly timed in between and you’d end up somewhere else?

I want to say some webpages actually do this to make you accidentally click on ads but I have no proof.

We A/B tested it, and the 750ms accordion produces maximum revenue. Why do you hate evidence-based decision making? /s

A/B testing is so gross. In other domains human experimentation of any kind, no matter how low risk, involves getting fully informed consent and ethics board approval before going ahead.

Experimental behavior manipulation, without even telling the subject they are part of a manipulation experiment? You would be chased out of the room and your reputation destroyed! Utterly unacceptable. But in webdev universe this is somehow seen as a totally normal practice.

This is exactly how users felt when Reddit ran A/B testing on their "feature" that forcibly signed out people on mobile browsers and said they needed to use the Reddit app to sign back in. I saw a crazy long thread of straight backlash about how messed up it was and how they aren't cattle to experiment on and how they didn't consent to that (which they prolly did in the T&C but no one reads that and actually understands what they're agreeing to).

Seeing as they were posting the backlash on Reddit, I'm guessing a lot of people downloaded the app to log in and Reddit said "Big Success!" when they checked the stats.