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The speed of the UI was established decades ago, there's no reason for it to speed up past the rate at which a person is satisfied when interacting with the system. But system performance improvement is real. There are ongoing enormous advances of compute and I/O power which allow new and improved media handling, more complex UI and workloads, and overall freer tradeoffs between memory capacity and time required to complete work. In other words, the system is always getting faster, but you're not, so a more powerful system allows more work to be done within your attention window. So upon this realization, you might become curious as to what the relationship between system performance and your perceptions of speed. Without explaining in any detail, you might first suspect that the relationship is non-intuitive, much in the way that speed of transportation and perception of distance traveled are not intuitive. A walk to the corner market by every measure is shorter than a flight across country, yet your perception of scale does not lead to the direct apprehension that the flight is 500 times faster than your stride. Same thing with computer power Another unintuitive aspect of performance is that speed relationships within computing systems are subject to a time vs. distance tradeoff with interactions generally slowing with distance. If your sense of performance comes from interacting with web sites, while the parts of your PC go really fast, the stuff you're accessing is arbitrarily far away, and subject the sum of all the delays over that distance, only some of which are affected by the speed of local processing. There's a famous law, similar to Moore's law, coined by Cray architect Gene Amdahl, that observes that no matter how many things a system can do at once, the time to complete a job are limited by the time required to those things that must occur in a sequence. For your PC the wifi connection is a tube through which all the stuff you want to access is ordered sequentially. Even if your PC and the computers you access were infinitely fast, it still takes time to get the data through that tube. So you might suspect that your experience accessing the web is generally tube limited, not PC limited. |