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Comment by noisy_boy | Hacker News Reader

I'm the kind of guy who notices tiny UI lag (and I think I'm not unique in that). This kind of slowness in everyday usage tends to not bother a lot of people but it really grates on my nerves. I don't think anyone needs faster flagship phones every year or two (my current one has already been close to two years) but performance due to higher specs does translate to an overall smoother experience. Also, I think thats kind of the point of the pinephone - those who are happy with 3 year old specs can continue so and those who want to upgrade to, say, a higher-res screen or a better camera can do so without ditching the entire phone.

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As they say, those who seek to combat traffic jams by building more roads, would also attempt to lose weight by undoing their belts.

It's not different with phones. Your 2 year old flagship phone does not have a laggy UI because it's slow. It's because people code for today's phone. And as long as enough people keep buying new phones, the software market will not optimize apps, since it's cheaper not to. And as long as software needs ever more resources, people will continue to buy new phones.

It's recursive. But it's not pure: the side effects are resource depletion, electronic waste, labour exploitation, increasing energy demand.

We won't escape this vicious cycle by perpetuating that very behaviour. And so maybe we can all do something about it, however little. Maybe by accepting a tiny bit of UI lag here and there.

I don't disagree with the principal of the argument. I also think by continuing to use my phone until it basically dies/breaks, I'm already doing my part. I am also a person who likes fast performance and doesn't want to invest time in changing the world by accepting a thousand cuts of lag daily. Maybe that's a flaw I have but I'm willing to live with that.

Or, given this is a site for devs and entrepeneurs, do all of that except for accepting unoptimised stuff - do our best to create and highlight greater utility in older stuff.

The WordPerfect for Dos story fits in here: an awful lot of software seems to increase cycles (processing power used) without a proportional increase in utility.

Mind, this is a symptom really of how "we" have made a consumer society where companies can't exist without fitting into an ever tightening upgrade cycle -- that's incompatible with reducing energy use, reducing carbon footprint, reducing resource wastage and pollution.

We've made a sort of Skinner Box for society. It's not going well, but we've got enough distractions ...

My 2 year old flagship phone (Blackberry Key2) does not have a laggy UI. My Pinephone does. And yes, I'm sensitive to lag but I'm not talking about minor lag. I'm talking about I push a button and then 15 seconds later after I thought that the keypress hadn't registered, suddenly I get popped into a different screen.

You're not wrong, but what you say is also not helpful. You're suggesting a microeconomic solution to fix a macroeconomic problem. It's a form of the Tragedy of the Commons. Doing what you say will simply hurt the person who does it, while making no difference in the large scheme of things.

But I'm not proposing a solution. What I'm saying is that a vicious cycle isn't broken by shrugging and conceding defeat to whatever you feel "macroeconomics" is.

It's easy pointing fingers and blaming circumstances. But I'm asking you: what would hurt exactly? Would your life be worse without the iPhone 12? Would you me less productive, would you be less happy?

I'm also very sensitive to UI lag, but flagship phones are more a cause than a solution.

If you're on Android, enable developer options and disable animations. Not only is your phone now many orders of magnitude more useable because it's responsive to your actions instead of being in store demo mode with UIs built for videos in marketing banners, you can also use an old phone very comfortably.

I use a five year old mid tier phone quite comfortably. There is the occasional app that stutters because it bakes in its own pointless animations or NIH smooth scrolling, but this is easily solved by not using broken software.

I tweak the animation setting almost every time I get a new phone :)

I think that jquery animations on the web broke UX designers brains.

It's bad enough having a 300 ms animation. But when two, or even three get chained together, in addition to whatever lag there is for building the new UI elements, it's unbearable. And then there are the piss-poor apps on iPhone that seem to also depend on network data at some point, and delay all info display until the update comes through.

And the other issue with animations is that you're never sure when it's safe to tap a visible UI element, because it's not clear when that button that's sliding onto the screen will actually become active and responsive to user input. So the animation introduces tons of uncertainty about intersections too.

Animations should be capped to 100ms for any interaction. No chaining if one thing slides out, then another slides over. 100ms total, slide both those panels at once if you want to animate them, devs. Or bette yet, skip the stupid animation.

> Or better yet, skip the stupid animation.

I agree -- mostly.

I think that animations can make some things more usable, in the form of drawing attention to a change happening on screen. I do agree whole-heartedly about the lengths of the animations though. If you're going to do an animation, make it fast enough I don't have to wait on it.

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