&gt; <i>&quot;so that&#x27;s 200ms, for the whole device to go from non-powered to fully working animation.&quot;</i><p>That&#x27;s 200ms more than 0ms, which is the status quo for dumb devices.<p>&gt; <i>&quot;yet, it&#x27;s still fast enough that I can&#x27;t perceive any delay.&quot;</i><p>Right, because the inputs aren&#x27;t on-screen. Touchscreen devices inject more delay because you have to:<p>- wake the device<p>- read the output<p>- decide on input<p>- press the input<p>With a device like your microwave (or your arcade game) steps 1 and 2 don&#x27;t exist, because the inputs are visible even when the screen is off. With your microwave you just walk up and start punching your desired buttons right away, the screen will catch up to you quickly.<p>And this is also why this is fundamentally a product design problem that isn&#x27;t fixable via simply faster software - a non-primed human will take 500ms+ at each of these steps just in reaction time, the 200ms wake-time and whatnot is minor in comparison to the delay caused by having the human take multiple steps to do something. This is fundamentally about modes of interaction and not really about software performance.<p>We are at a stage in tech development where human delays vastly overwhelm purely machine-caused lag time. This is why compressing multi-step processes into a single step (or eliminating them altogether) is so valuable in terms of improving usability. Conversely - and this is something a lot of futurists just don&#x27;t get - injecting <i>additional steps</i> into the use of something, even with very high performance software, results in disproportionate delays, and makes the product overall more annoying and cumbersome to use. This is the heart of why nearly all smarthome devices have been utter failures so far - despite doing something useful, they dramatically increase the human load on their usage.