It's still present. JSON/JS parsing still has a delay. And in either case (as the author states) not everyone is using an iPhone over 5G. Heavy React apps are a miserable experience on low end Android phones, even when the connection is fast. I've seen JS/JSON parsing times in the multiple seconds.
Read the article. Typical users had old browsers often with poor reception. One user was using a PlayStation Portable which had very limited WWW capability.
"What, support Safari? Isn't that, like, less than 20%? And its standards support is abysmal! No, not worth my time, they can upgrade to a normal browser like everyone else."
If Rick Rubin could take a tape to his car to listen to his mixes, your product people can try their websites on £20 phones from Tesco. They can ask to sit in on user tests with minority groups. Extending your knowledge like this is trivial, but rarely done.
May i ask why, specifically, Rick Rubin? I don't know who that is, but whenever we finished mastering a new song, we had a series of "systems" we listened to it on. We went out to my dad's work van and listened there. We called up our friend with a street-comp sound system in his car, and listened in there (neighbors must have loved us!), and then a "cheap" boombox with large-ish speakers but cheap.
if it sounded "clean" on all 3, without the bass muffling everything, and the highs not hurting the eardrums, we called it "good" and released.
i don't work in the industry, sorry. We just made music and released mp3s, 1997-2008. Co-creator of Def Jam, alright.
I wonder if David Lynch watches his stuff on a tiny screen just to make sure everyone has a good experience.
hint: no, he thinks small screens are stupid.
ETA: after like 3 years of mastering and reviewing this way i trusted my ears and my studio monitors enough to know what it would sound like. I also wrote in headphones and mastered on speakers, then remastered in monitor headphones. Anyhow, i think the whole point i was making is "yes, this is a good thing to do, for music, for websites, for software, etc"
Not testing your software in the way your users use it is the disrespect. Not everyone has a modern device. Not everyone has 12gb RAM. Not everyone has 100mbps or even 10mbps. Not everyone has "unlimited" Internet.
If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load on the free Metro Wi-Fi, I'll go back to my search and pick a different page. If it takes more than 3 seconds to load on gigabit on a PC, I'll remember it and never click on links to it again.
If you don't respect my devices, then your work doesn't deserve my respect.
(Don't get me started on people calling themselves software _engineers_)
This is a matter of perspectives here. Some of my friends are absolutely brilliant lawyers and they trump me in their reasoning abilities (while I am a typ. HN member, high-tech engineer). Yet, they would not know some tech basics. I see lawyers struggle with formatting in Microsoft Word all the time :-), for one.
A brilliant physicist friend likewise once told me he is clueless how real numbers are handled in computers (not talking about floating point encoding specifics but conceptually itself). Yes, I can say that feels dumb, but I cannot deny that he is a brilliant physicist.
It's not about perspectives, basically every human has the same baseline reasoning capabilities. Understanding that "more work = more time needed" is part of that baseline.
The only "excuse" would be if someone didn't know what a film is at all, because they can't be expected to reason about something they don't have any knowledge about.