If you have been in the habit of using computers for at least, say 15 years, it is possible that you have noticed a drop in the feeling of agility of the machines over time – which is paradoxical, considering the dizzying advance of processing technologies, however a very palpable feeling. Now, the developer Dan Luu decided to put that feeling to the test in the newest article on his website.
Luu took the most basic and quintessential action of the experience of using a computer – the act of pressing a key – and decided to compare its latency on a series of machines from different times with the most varied configurations possible. He positioned a camera with a very high frame rate and measured the milliseconds between the moment the key is pressed until the moment the character in question appears on the screen.
Here are the results:
Surprisingly, the computer with the lowest latency among all those tested was a Apple IIe, from 1983, with only 30 milliseconds between the keystroke and the appearance of the character. Only a “recent” computer with very tight specifications managed to get close, with a time of 50ms, while other popular machines – such as the 2014 MacBook Pro – achieved much slower numbers.
The reason that older machines outperform newer ones in latency is very simple: complexity. According to Luu, the Apple II system code is made in a way that keyboard actions are recorded almost immediately, without the computer having to deal with other processes running simultaneously – as is well known, a modern machine has millions of processes happening at the same time, so you can’t give the keyboard the same “level of attention”.
Interesting to note that even with touch-sensitive devices, only one managed to match the Apple IIe: the 10.5-inch iPad Pro, and yet, only with the use of Apple Pencil – a normal touch, in turn, took 70ms to register.
This table with the latency of touchscreen devices, by the way, also serves to prove something that we all already knew: in general, iOS has a touch response much faster than other mobile operating systems.
So, were you surprised by the results? What do you have to say about the topic? Leave your impressions below.
via Daring Fireball
