It is stereotypically Amazon to spend tens- or hundreds-of-millions to develop a fully-integrated next generation truck and then try to save ten bucks by putting the slowest possible CPU behind the head unit / infotainment system.
I'd go so far as to say there's an inverse correlation here. My 100Mhz desktop had a more responsive UI than any computer I've used in the last 5 years.
Text editing on that 100Mhz computer felt responsive, typing characters had them appear on the screen instantly, I could copy+paste 100s of lines of text without a problem. Now, I load notion.so on a 4Ghz cpu, and typing is sluggish, scrolling has severe lag, and pasting 100 lines of text sometimes takes several seconds.
All this is me saying that I'm more inclined to blame software than to blame the hardware for UI lag.
The "Living Computer Museum" in Seattle was (up until covid closed it) an excellent way to experience the past.
I had this same insight and feeling then. The old machines, running their old operating system versions, felt responsive and crisp compared to performing similar tasks on modern machines with modern software equivalents.
Windows 3x/9x with first real multitasking and swap - things got quite sluggish. Early browsers were particularly eager of gulping ram and bringing everything to halt.
Nowdays it feels somewhere in the middle with copious amounts of ram stuff can be fast once up and running, but it seems every app either wants to load from web on every step or tries to index your drive on every keypress.
I also hated floppies. Squeek, squeek, grind, grind.
The old hard drives were fine, though.
Both of these machines are many times more responsive than any thing put out in the last decade despite being thousands of times less powerful. The applications they run are made to serve my needs as a user 1st. It gets out of my way. The user interface is clearly designed for the mouse and keyboard I am obviously using. It is made to help me accomplish tasks more efficiently rather than stroking some designer's ego or chasing some fad. Most of the software I use was released "done" rather than released half-baked with the hope of future updates. I don't have to worry about having my privacy invaded.
It's not rose tinted glasses when I'm not wearing any and can look behind me and see the color. Modern mass-market technology is "worse is better" writ large.
For the record, "they don't make em' like they used to" is an absolutely valid complaint. Note that now even with SSD, ridiculous memory and cpu, websites still manage to stutter ( but I accept online is its own animal ). Part of me wants to go over Windows releases as an example of resource use across generations ( and how they leaped ).
<<I distinctly remember experiencing major performance gains when moving to more memory than my system and apps needed to use and the move to solid state drives.
But do you still see it or is that performance assumed now ( making lazy design decisions easier )?
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/kdr3p6/how_would_amds_... [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg [3]https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/03/hacker-reduces-gta-on...
Personally, I would be ecstatic to ditch VSCode for some super fast native code thingy, but the truth is that it's often just a better experience. The ecosystem is big, and the performance is not all bad news (the ripgrep-based search is pretty damn impressive, and beyond that, it feels like VSCode has less issues with performance cliffs in normal use cases that I've encountered than a lot of older editors, including KDE's Kwrite and GNOME's Gedit, but even other Electron editors like Atom, too. It's not perfect, but there are times when I left Kate to VSCode because opening some file made Kate way too unresponsive.)
All that said, I really do miss TextMate.
I know Jetbrains is making a text editor, too. It does look very nice, but I have yet to try it.
This all being said, Jetbrains IDEs do still feel less responsive than more native stuff like Kwrite or Notepad++. It can be forgiven of course, but I think it's a valid point to note down, especially given how often people bring up that article comparing latency of desktop computers over time.
It's still there, no? https://macromates.com/
So, sure, TextMate still exists. It’s still my default scratchpad for modifying text, and I even use it for some light scripting from time to time, but I don’t actually use it to build and maintain complex software any longer.
Edit: I'm aware there's the browser one now built into GitHub.
It seems like there might be a slight negative correlation (newer is worse). The data is fairly all over the place though.
I always view the IBM selectric as "beyond the horizon" in terms of responsiveness: that's 25–30ms.
Not sure what lag there is on actual pencil, but there's this somewhat famous video[0] from Microsoft Research, where they test various values of input lag on a touch screen, and demonstrate that even 10ms is noticeable - but 1ms is about enough for it to feel instant. With 1ms lag, drawing on a tablet seems to feel just like drawing on paper (I personally haven't had an opportunity to test a tablet with 1ms lag, so I can't tell).
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Of course it did, because you were only editing the text. If you switch off syntax highlighting, linting, autocomplete, type checking, git integration, spell checking, grammar checking, and everything else your editor is doing then you can experience the joy of fast typing again.
A 4GHz CPU is only 40 times faster than a 100MHz CPU (not that clock speed is the important bit here, but whatever), but you're asking it to do probably about 20,000 times more computation every time you press a key. And then you complain that it's too slow!
It is a requirement imposed upon me that I write documents in notion, and that text editor doesn't let me import locally written files since it doesn't have any lossless textual representation. I can't avoid the laggy text editor. It's a requirement that I use slack, and no combination of settings for the browser or desktop client seems to stop massive input lag.
Typing into iOS or android's keyboard, in any text box, is an experience with very noticeable lag.
I know that the computer is doing thousands of times more things than my older computer did, but I don't want it to do that stuff and there's no way to turn it off while still participating in modern society (i.e. using a cell phone and working at a company).
[citation needed]
The problem with slowness is in the design, not inproved functionality. The root cause is that modern software runs a ton of checks for every keystroke, tries to talk to the mothership every second and is designed to advertise and upsell instead of solving actual user problems.
I think the 2 issues hitting modern text editors are they are FAR too synchronous (they are doing the syntax highlighting, fonts, etc, with every keystroke rather than in the background).
And rendering has gotten WAY too nuts. Seems like all modern text editors are full blown web browsers, usually so they can be easily cross platform.
And responsiveness back then was so good, because your program was very close to hardware with very little in between if not running completely free from OS abstractions.
This! It also meant that it was very very easy for any program or misbehaving driver to completely crash your system. Not to mention all the security implications of every app having direct hardware access.
Dan Luu did cool experiments with input lag (https://danluu.com/input-lag/).
If we want to talk about how things work directly, my program can get things to the GPU in far less than a millisecond. The safety layers are not the problem.
Now, you might argue 'the 4GHz CPU is multicore!', and so sure, maybe we're up to 8 times 40, which is, I'm pretty sure, 320. And maybe you'll say that the cache is bigger, so you'll be able to keep the data pipelines full and get more done on the faster CPU. But how are you getting to 'at least 2,000'?
The clock frequency is not a good way of measuring performance. Never was. Even earlier designs as the 8086 did not do one thing (instruction) every cycle. They did far less.
Modern CPUs are extremely complex beasts that can take in a lot of instructions. They take a good look on those instructions, change them in a way that does not alter the result but makes some optimizations possible and then distribute those instruction to a bunch of internal workers that can work on those at the same time. More on this can be found in the wikipedia rabbit hole starting with instruction level parallelism.
One way to measure this is to look at how many of a selected set of instructions per cycle can be done. An 8086 could do 0.066. A 386DX did 0.134, a 486 could do 0.7. A Pentium 100 already could do 1.88, and so on. Modern CPUs get to 10, per core.
But wait, there's more. This comparison gives only a very rough idea of a CPUs capabilities since it focuses on a very specific thing that might have little to do with actual observed performance. Especially since modern CPUs have extremely specialized instructions that can do enormous amount of computations on enormous amounts of data in little time. And there we are in the wonderful world of benchmarks that may or may not reflect reality by measuring execution time of a defined workload.
Passmark does CPU benchmarks and their weakest CPU in the database seems to be a Pentium 4 @ 1.3GHz. Single Core, single thread. It comes in at 77 (passmarks?). An i7-13700 is rated with 34,431. Does that make it 500 times faster than the 1.3GHz P4? Hard to tell, but its a hell of a difference. And from the P4 to a Pentium or even a 486 running at 100Hz ... at least another hell of a difference.
We can also try Dhrystone MIPS, another benchmark. Wikipedia has - strangely enough - numbers for the Pentium and the 486 at 100MHz: 188 MIPS for the Pentium, 70 MIPS for the 486. The most modern (2019!) desktop cpu entry comes in around 750,000 MIPS. A Threadripper from 2020 over 2,300,000 MIPS.
So, how much more can a modern CPU do than an ancient one? A lot. And especially a lot more than you would expect from the faster frequency alone. Even with only one core, it can do several hundred times the workload. And we got a lot of cores.
If hinting, spellchecker and autocompletion takes so much computation you have terrible tooling. This kind of functions existed 25 years ago and they were real-time.
And a lot of those computers did do fancy checking, and a modern CPU can do ten times the instructions per clock on top of having 6-8 cores.
So that 100MHz computer had maybe 8 or 16MB of RAM - it was struggling to run anything other than the text editor you were using - no, you aren't running an MP3 player in the background, winamp has not been released yet; no you are not running your email client in the background, you're on a 28.8K dialup modem and you are not hanging on the line on the offchance that mail arrives - you are dialing up, waiting 30 seconds for the modem to handshake, then watching your emails trickle in at a rate of one every few seconds.
The machine took noticeable time to seek and load or save to the hard disk, so it made up for that by trying to keep everything in RAM all the time, with the downside that if it crashed (and it frequently crashed) you would lose all your work since you last hit save.
So yes, the cursor responded right away when you pressed a key. But other than that, golden days, those were not.
Have you ever seen the inside of a Ford Transit van? They're remarkably pedestrian. Or a UPS truck, made from steel and brawn and not much else. These things need to be engineered to take a beating. Yet this has push-button start with a fob. (Keys are a much better choice for fleet vehicles, if not only for key management, they withstand abuse in the field much better than fobs, which are expensive and difficult to replace.)
What they should have installed instead is a cup holder for the sports drink urine bottle. Which you keep next to the cigarettes and burrito wrappers, to the left of the shitty basic FM radio with real knobs.
How are you supposed to use a touchscreen for basic functions whilst wearing gloves? This thing was designed by office-dwellers.
All they need is for Ford or Benz to turn their bare bones cargo vans electric and they'll be turning these Rivians into beer cans.
You mean like this?
You'll notice the Ford Transit EV still retains the traditional mechanical key, and also features a simple locking glove box that works off the same key.
But why do that when you could make the glove box electronically locking via bluetooth proximity over the infotainment.
People have deluded themselves into believing that EV's must be packed with superfluous electronics and other futuristic garbage, whilst it's just the drivetrain that's different.
I have an 18 year old VW T5 Transporter with light camper fitout, which will do 900km (550 miles) on a tank.
The Ford linked above claims 200km (120 miles) between charges, the Merc 95 miles.
These vans won't replace my can fory usecase, not yet, and not at that price.
They'd be reasonably for a delivery route I suppose.
200km is more than enough for a typical parcel delivery day.
Most of the Transits I see (in the UK) are not used to drive long distances in a day but to carry stuff around. Think electricians, plumbers, all those trades.
Even an Amazon delivery driver may not drive more than 200km a day. What they do is plenty of stops and I suspect it takes them hours to drive just 20km.
The ones with less range can be smaller, lighter, and so less expensive. If all you need is 120 miles, there it is.
Someone will make one with a bigger battery.
EDIT: Also, in many countries you can drive a van with a normal driver's license provided it's under, usually, 3.5 tonnes. Once you go over that you need a special license. 900kms worth of battery might make it difficult to fit a reasonable payload under the legal limit.
There are many people who never drive more than 100 miles a day. Why do they need a car with 200, 300 mile range? Not to mention we'll be investing in charging stations along the Interstates, so charge scarcity will be less of a problem.
Fleet vehicles are the perfect first adopters of EVs - they have been using alternative fuel sources for decades in the form of natural gas and LNG. They have short daily range, they go back to a central depot each shift.
It isn't awful range any more than a Mini has awful towing capacity for the person who never tows.
Sure there are some nice comforts and features that will make life easier for the operator, but on the whole it's a massive step backwards in actual durability, utility and usability.
I don't know about this one, but some car touch screens can be operated with gloves just fine.
(They still suck in comparison to actual buttons and knobs, though)
No it is quantifiably worse than texting. In fact it is worse than drinking and driving. [0]
[0] https://www.trl.co.uk/publications/interacting-with-android-...
Automatic climate controls don't cut it--change directions such that the sun starts beating down on me and I'm going to need to turn up the fans beyond what automated systems would choose. Test driving the Tesla Model S, on two separate occasions while attempting to set the climate controls I almost got into a wreck--it not only is only on the touchscreen, but also buried under something like 5 menus. WTF? Volvo XC-40 and Mustang also have no climate control buttons. In my area, all the other electric cars have a waiting list longer than a year. I want to buy electric, but safety is paramount--driving a car is far and away the most dangerous thing I do on a daily basis and I'd like it to be as safe as possible. I ended up with a Subaru this time.
Hopefully someone will make an electric car with physical buttons for the climate controls.
I drive a VW e-up! for the same reasons. It is a simple city car with analog controls and it's perfect for the Berlin city.
Ah there are touchscreen-friendly gloves now. Amazon has plenty in stock!
Delivery drivers already have to deal with that issue because everything is on smartphone/tablet.
These are already a thing, at least in Europe. Ford only released theirs this year and the Mercedes ones are next year, I think, but Peugeot and Renault have had various electric vans out for a while; you see them around a good bit in Dublin.
"I used to deliver out here in the Bay Area. This Van has SO MANY improvements over the normal Transits and Fluid Vans. I absolutely LOVE the removal of the side door for the new passenger door space. It actually makes the most sense ever as someone who actually delivered. The spacing on the shelves is questionable to me however.... They are DEFINATELY less wide, the Transits could fit a tote on them with maybe a few inches of overhang."
(Also what the other commenter said.)
Suppose a better infotainment system saves even one minute of time per day. Over a 300 day work-year, that's five hours of driver-work, valued on the order of $100 (at $20/hr). All other things being equal, $100 would go a long way in an infotainment BOM.
If this isn't being done for cost reasons, I expect it might be a result of bulk ordering. Rivian isn't a large car manufacturer, so it might not be ordering custom equipment from the manufacturers. If they have to compromise by taking an infotainment package wholesale from existing mass-production lines, then maybe there's no "$100-equivalent" upgrade on the market.
Especially UI developers should not have retina displays or 3x 43" 4K displays when developing web page layouts
Back when I was writing some quite heavy 3D software we would always test each release on a machine that was slightly below our advertised minimum spec to make sure it was at least usable there.
Anyone who has worked for amazon is fully aware of how the company internals being literally held together with duct tape.