Computer Latency: 1977-2017

Dan Luu:

I have this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices I’ve run into in the past few months. Here are the results.

It may not surprise you that it’s an Apple device with the lowest latency of any he tested. It may surprise you that that device is an Apple IIe. Luu’s explanation for why this is so is just fascinating.

Also unsurprising: iOS devices have noticeably lower latency for scrolling than Android ones.

★ Tuesday, 26 December 2017