I recently started looking for a new(er) laptop, because it often felt slow. But I started looking at when it was slow, and it was mostly when using things like GMail. I guess my feeling was "if my laptop isn't even fast enough for email, it's time to upgrade". But doing things I actually care about (coding, compiling) it's actually totally fine, so I'm going to hold on to it a bit longer.

This is the exact feeling I had. My 2019 intel MacBook Pro has 12 cores, 32gb ram and a 1TB hard drive. Yet, most consumer web apps like Gmail, Outlook and Teams are excruciatingly slow.

What is surprising is that a few years ago, these apps weren’t so terrible on this exact hardware.

I’m convinced that there’s an enormous amount of bloat right at the application framework level.

I finally caved and bought a new M series Mac and the apps are much snappier. But this is simply because the hardware is wicked fast and not because the software got any better.

I really wish consumer apps cared less about user retention and focused more on user empowerment.

All it would take is forcing an artificial CPU slowdown to something like a 5 year old CPU when testing/dogfooding apps for developers to start caring about performance more.

> All it would take is forcing an artificial CPU slowdown

Technically, yes. But for many large tech companies it would require a large organisational mindset shift to go from more features is more promotions is more money to good, stable product with well maintained codebase is better and THAT would require a dramatic shift away from line must go up to something more sustainable and less investor/stock obsessed.

The software bloat is starting to outpace the hardware folks' best efforts. iOS 27 runs like ass on my year-old iPhone 16 Pro.

I think the problem is a lack of "engineering culture".

People experience latency but if you “saw like a corporation” you could only see throughput and never latency.

Obviously not with Gmail/Facebook, in that case it's just 100% incentive misalignment.

The others, probably, VCs are incentivized to fund the people who allocate the most resources towards growth and marketing, as long as the app isn't actively on fire investors will actively push you away from allocating resources to make your tech good.

You would be surprised at how bad the “engineering culture” is at meta. There are surely people who care about page load latency but they are a tiny minority.

I mean, if you look at Meta's main product it's hard to imagine anyone there cares about engineering. It might be the single worst widely used tech product in existence, and considering they produce the frameworks it's built on it's even more embarrassing.

There are a few people who care A LOT about engineering, otherwise everything would completely collapse and not work at all. But they are far from the majority.

What would you change about it?

Of course. Anything that has greedy and/or non-technical management will be slow.

I have a 10 gig internet connection (Comcast fiber, 5.6 ms ping to google.com with almost no jitter). Websites are slower today than they were when I got DSL for the first time in the 1990s--except HN of course. It takes multiple seconds to load a new tab in Teams (e.g. the activities tab) and I can see content pop in over that time. It's an utter disgrace.