So here I am, with my beefy SSD machine, a 50 Mbit/s connection, a JS engine that is orders of magnitude faster than anything we had a few years ago, HTML5 offline storage, HTTP/2, still waiting >5sec for several Google properties to load, waiting >15sec for CEF-based Spotify to load, knowing that with today's tech, these things could fire up within <100ms.

It's no disaster if I have to wait for a few seconds, but especially for secondary tasks (like looking up an address on Maps or playing a song) which I do en passant while focusing on something else, I find that waiting for only a few seconds can already steal my focus. When I fire up a music app (be it non-Google Spotify, Google Play Music or whatever), it would be great if at least the search form was available immediately. Knowing that it won't, that instead my expensive PC will go sluggish for a few moments, I find myself just avoiding these things increasingly often.

And it's sad to know that Google once was pretty obsessed about reducing these little latencies wherever possible. Today, they develop SPDY and QUIC to save a few ms, then throw web frameworks at me that take whole seconds to load.

It's not that I didn't appreciate beautiful interface design. It's nice to have a mobile OS that arguably looks better than iOS. But it also was pretty awesome to have an almost latency-free experience (and good information design, making efficient use of my screen), even with an old netbook and shaky GPRS internet on the train.