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Comment by jakear | Hacker News Reader

Curious: does anyone have an actual negative user experience on the website? I tested it on both my shotty WiFi (for reference, I’m unable to stream YouTube at 720p), and cellular (2 bars), and I found the page to load quickly and be reasonably responsive either way. In the thread I think twitter user Kenneth Auchenberg puts it best:

> Come on. Look at the experience and tell me you expected it to be 1kb? This is an interactive application, not a text document. [...] We have started to chase a false “unicorn” narrative of websites with expected app-like experiences, but sizes like text documents from the 2000s. Something doesn’t add up.

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I avoid video like the plague on my phone to prevent excess data charges. But it's reasonable for a single page load to use more than 1% of my monthly limit?

I don't expect websites to being the kB range, but somewhere in the single digit megabytes seems to me like a reasonable limit

Maybe the problem Isn’t the page size. Maybe the problem is the artificial bandwidth scarcity being created by US cell providers.

They have no way to increase sales due to basically complete market saturation, so instead they find new ways to soak their existing customer base.

People always seem to forget how horrible things were when at&t was about to acquire T-Mobile. Had they not been forced to hand TM all that spectrum we’d still be paying $100/mo for 2GB of hard capped data.

Not sure about the GP but they might not be in the US. There are many parts of the world where bandwidth is scarce and expensive (w.r.t. average income). There’s a reason why both Android and Apple have “low data modes”

If you read the tread that follows on the original tweet: It seems that the Apple website respects this and returns a low data version on low bandwidth connections.

> Maybe the problem is the artificial bandwidth scarcity being created by US cell providers.

This. When I (in France) can €15.99 a month for unlimited calls and texts to phones in France, the US, Canada, China (plus unlimited calls to fixed lines in 100 other countries, too) and a 100GB 4G data plan included, too, it seems crazy that US carriers charge so much. Sure, there are infrastrcuture differences in serving a country of more than 300 million spread out over a landmass so big rather than a small, more densely populated country like France, but it still seems out of control.

I've lived in both Japan and Canada, not the US. All the reasonable-priced plans in both countries had limits in the single digit GBs. Japan was better in that data over the limit just got capped at a very low speed, rather than paying extra. But in all three cases, a single page load unexpectedly using 65mB is outside reasonable.

> Maybe the problem is the artificial bandwidth scarcity being created by US cell providers.

Spectrum is actually limited and cell towers aren't free.

Spectrum should’ve been a shared resource from the start. It’s scarce because there’s Massive amounts that have been purchased just to stifle competition and isn’t even in use.

Funny, for all those reasons 5g has moved to a shared model.

As an electrical engineer, I am honestly astounded by how well spectrum has been allocated/shared. It's one of the greatest miracles of the modern era that tens of thousands of antennas can simultaneously jam into a stadium and still have cell service, radio, TV, wifi, walkie talkies, and

Bandwidth is scarce because it's limited by physics. There's some minor inefficiencies, but it's generally pretty good, in terms of bits per second per Hertz.

> Maybe the problem Isn’t the page size. Maybe the problem is the artificial bandwidth scarcity

Is he using it wrong?

I have not tested it, but I believe the site does not load 65.4Mb when on a phone (might consider bandwidth too)

Yeah. I do routinely tether my laptop, I wonder if there is any recognition of that.

There is the "Save-Data" HTTP header[0] that your browser can send[1], but the AirPods page doesn't support it (not many websites do actually).

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Sa...

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/save-data/

It loads 29MB when loaded on simulated iPhone 6 screen size.

Mobile browser apps aren't doing anything in this arena; they could be doing a lot more. They could, for example, pause all requests upon hitting a configured limit for the page (like 1 MB) and then only continue downloading if you confirm. The ideal experience would be to confirm the total amount to download ahead of time, but that often isn't known.

Sounds like your limit is 6GB.

I understand that you don’t want a high phone bill, but in a lot of ways this limit is self-imposed.

You chose a small limit that fits a light user. Someone who doesn’t check webpages purely out of boredom or phone addiction will have no problem staying within a small data limit like this even if they occasionally visit a large, video-based marketing site once in a while.

Meanwhile, unlimited plans from various carriers in the United States are reasonably priced enough. $40/month from Visible (Verizon MVNO), for example.

If you read sibling comments, you'll see that I am not in the US, so most of your comment does not apply. A $40 plan in Canada might get me 1 GB if I was lucky (I can't actually find a plan that cheap that includes any data at all). The cheapest "unlimited" plans (which are 10gb then speed restricted) is about $80.

As to 6GB being a "small limit that fits a light user" - I use my data for work, tethering a couple hours every work day. I also browse/read probably an hour a day on data. I stay within the limit by avoiding YouTube, and now apparently apple websites.

The scrolling is unpleasantly rough and unpredictable on Firefox for Android on my relatively recent phone. I could only successfully move to the next item half of the time or so.

FWIW, John Gruber posted about high CPU usage, the page being slow and scrolljacking just a few days ago. [1]

The page isn’t well designed (from the performance point of view) for whatever it’s meant to showcase.

People accuse Google of being hostile to Firefox and partial to Chrome on its properties, and here Apple seems to be doing the same to its own hardware and browsers (depending on the year and version).

[1]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/10/28/airpods-pro-scr...

It seems to have some adaption to available bandwidth: as soon as I enable throttling in the browser dev tools, it stops loading all the videos and only loads images instead. Which is better than the experience unthrottled: fans spinning up, stuttery scrolling, ...

> We have started to chase a false “unicorn” narrative of websites with expected app-like experiences, but sizes like text documents from the 2000s. Something doesn’t add up.

May be it is just me, I dont expect or want a "App Like" experience. I want a page, and at best a slightly interactive, moderate animation added web page. Not Web App.

I dont see many around me wanted Web App either ( At least for AirPod Pro Page Purposes ). The chase to Web App, or expected to be web apps has been coming from developers and solely developers.

So the I think the chase App experience and Size from 2000s is a false narrative in itself.

I would have given it a pass grade if the Apple AirPro Page were loading smoothly, but it wasn't. The page didn't even scroll at 30fps with my quad core MacBook Pro, and I am longing for Webpage or even Apps to render at 120fps.

It's not that it looks slow, it does a very good job at loading fast what you see first, and preloading the rest before you see it. The problem is that is keeps preloading and preloading content even after you've reached the end of the page, just in case you need it.

It is heavy but looks fast because you pay for it in advance, and it looks and works great. Well, except for the bit about needing an iPhone or iPad to see the airpods in AR, I'm sure it could have been done in a more compatible way.

Edit: gave in and opened the AR bit on an iPad. it's just a non-interactive 3D model of the opened case with the earphones shown, that you can spin manually or image in your desk and spin yourself around it. Nothing actually interesting.

First off all, yes. On mobile(Note 10+) the first experience is lag when I start scrolling. Second, it has very little information and a bunch of scroll-points are just blank and a total waste of time, resulting in "oh, slightly further down, whops, too far".

Runs pretty terrible on my LG G7 ThinQ, scrolling is incredibly janky

Opened on a Moto G6 (but on a good enough wifi internet) and it loaded seemingly instantenously. No problem scrolling too.

Wholeheartedly agree with the quoted comment

Scrolling lags and stutters horribly on my MacBook Pro with Safari.

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