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Life's Too Short For Slow Computers (theverge.com)
Nilay Patel, the Editor-in-Chief of The Verge looks back the Apple Watch, the company's first wearable device which went on sale roughly a year ago. In the article, Patel notes that Apple Watch, a computing product, is just too slow at doing some of the most basic things such as running apps. He writes: Here's the problem with the Apple Watch: it's slow. It was slow when it was first announced, it was slow when it came out, and it stayed slow when Watch OS 2.0 arrived. When I reviewed it last year, the slowness was so immediately annoying that I got on the phone with Apple to double check their performance expectations before making "it's kind of slow" the opening of the review. [...] The grand ambition of the Apple Watch is to be a full-fledged computer on your wrist, and right now it's a very slow computer. If Apple believes the watch is indeed destined to become that computer, it needs to radically increase the raw power of the Watch's processor, while maintaining its just-almost-acceptable battery life. And it needs to do that while all of the other computers around us keep getting faster themselves.
is not designed to be a full fledged computer, treating it as such is stupid.
Though I will freely admit that many third party apps suck (and are often trying to solve problems that are not suited to the watch).
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
No, we are surrounded by powerful, capable computers, and we run them into the ground interpreting (or JIT-compiling) Javashit frameworks to interpret/JIT-compile Javashit code, and then use that to manipulate the DOM on the fly, all to produce a little fade-in/out effect to make up for the delay while other Javashit contacts an ad auction amongst another few dozen offsite machines bidding for the right to serve yet more Javashit, when all we wanted to do was read static text on a http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
We do it because programmer time is more expensive than user time, but the net effect is that we now employ sledgehammers to swat flies because flyswatters aren't clever enough.
let me note that plenty of much older and slower hardware managed to run just fine, even snappy. Thus, hardware as such cannot be the problem. It's software that demands more from the hardware than the hardware can deliver. And that, as they say, is fixable in software.
I think life is way too short to waste it immersed in the Internet of Things. There is so much more to do in life than spend it following an obsession with technology for technology's sake. I don't want computers dangling from my body, following me to the bathroom (that's what my dogs are for), monitoring my every breath, and of course, reporting every detail of my life to a bunch of marketers.
I want to go outside, ride my bike, hike with my dogs, and enjoy time with my family, all without being constantly bothered, interrupted, and monitored by some device.
Now, get off my lawn, you meddling kids.
I came here to say this. Windows 3.11 can now run entirely in the cache of my laptop's mid-range processor. Applications that could be envisioned for that level of power include just about everything you would want to do with a watch. You're not short on computronium, you're too cheap to program for the environment.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I'm torn here.
There's no need for desktop-performance on a watch.
But equally, there's no need for a watch to "feel" sluggish at all.
Apple are even skilled at such tricks. Load up a modern Apple Mac OS X image in a VMWare machine. Dial down the specifications of the machine to the bare minimum. Make sure you DON'T have graphical acceleration etc. on.
Now slide over the bottom row of icons that you get on Mac OS. It will look and slide as smooth as silk. How do they do that? They pre-rasterise the icons in a variety of sizes and keep them loaded in RAM so you're basically seeing a flickbook of all the different sizes depending on which icon your mouse is over at that moment. No, they ARE NOT using "scalable vector icons" - it's pre-rendered from an those vectors into multiple bitmaps instead ahead of time.
It's simple, beautiful, fast. But it's also a con. It's not ACTUALLY resizing those icons or blitting them to the screen via an OpenGL filter or similar in real-time. It's just been optimised to its precise usage... to look "slippy, slidey, silky, bulgy" for the first time you log onto the machine and the thing you'll use to start all your programs. But you have to say that it "feels" nice even on a machine incapable of running anything else at a comfortable speed.
Apple could do similar. There's no reason the watch can't be high-res and super-responsive and just a fraction of a second latent to the message coming in or whatever. But they haven't done that. They haven't spent time optimising it to its intended usage. They've rushed it to market. There's no need for it to be able to render 4K video at 120fps or whatever. It just needs to show a simple interface fast, something a Z80 could do in the same position if you were to really want it to, just tie it to a bluetooth chip to talk to the phone and make the phone do the heavy lifting and the watch just display what it needs to.
That Apple, master of such tricks, hasn't done this means they aren't really interested in spending time on it, I think. It also means that competitors can have easy-wins. Nobody cares that the Apple Watch is 100 MHz and the Competitor Watch is only 99MHz if the competitors just feels so much sleeker to use.
Now, personally, I hate Apple and have never owned a single product of theirs in my life. But some things, especially where appearance matters over substance, they utilise clever tricks to good effect. With the Apple Watch, it just ... seems sloppy. Like they don't expect it to be successful, or like they expect it to be successful no matter what it actually does (the famous "It's expensive, it must be good" factor).
But just because the chip may not be the latest and greatest? That's no excuse for a bad user experience. The CPU and RAM specifications in my client machines haven't changed in years but going from 7 to 8 to 10 actually makes the same machine "feel" faster, even if statistically it may not be.
That Apple can't avoid this tells me they had no idea what to do with it when it was being designed, or just don't care because they don't plan on any more of them.