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.
The whole point of having a watch is to tell the time, and if the watch is slow, then it isn't fit for the purpose for which it is made, is it? :)
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
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.
Doesn't make it not uselessly slow.
Here are two things that you'd think Apple would take care to ensure are fucking instant on a Watch but instead can take up to five seconds to load:
Setting a timer, setting alarms.
Sorry, but any complaint about the Apple Watch being too slow is completely justified considering that it's often faster to do things on the phone, and that includes things that watches have been doing successfully for fucking years such as starting a stop watch or setting an alarm to get you up in the morning.
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.
Sorry, I tried to make this the first post but my raspberry pi too so long to load the page I had to switch over to my $39 kindle and it took me a while to tap in these words.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.