> The built-in animations on Apple's software are sometimes hundreds of times slower than on their competitors, in ways which can't be accounted for.

You can turn down the animation times for most of this with "defaults write" commands. Set them to 0 or as small as you want. Here's a good list to get started:

https://gist.github.com/j8/8ef9b6e39449cbe2069a

> I don't need an interface which throbs, wiggles, jiggles, shines, and refracts, I need an interface that's snappy and fast.

System Settings -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion: Enabled System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency: Enabled

What saddens me is that a decade and a half ago, Apple led that charge with a reliable and unblockable UI thread on the iPhone.

Now that said iPhone is a thousand times faster, just invoking the keyboard can cause a serious delay with stutters.

I think a big part of this in recent years is SwiftUI just not being fully-cooked and Apple trying to shove it into a bunch of areas without enough attention to performance. Not sure how it is on iOS, but for example, the Settings app feels chuuuunky if you navigate through the panes with up and down arrow keys. I wasn't able to make a selectable list view that worked consistently and didn't feel like a regression compared to an equivalent AppKit view

It's odd to see this comment, since I've always had the opposite experience (at least when comparing Windows and MacOS -- I haven't used desktop linux much in the past 20 years). On MacOS, when I click something, something happens, or at the very least starts to happen (and I get some visual indication). While in Windows I often click on something and get no indication that something happened or started happening, so I click again, and then suddenly perform the action twice. This most often happens when opening programs, but it happens in other places too sometimes.

Package management, too. I recently got a MacBook for work, but it’s sitting on my desk and I’m continuing to use my Lenovo. Managing software updates is much better on Linux. As is managing windows (via Niri in my case). macOS really feels like a downgrade.

I find using non-Apple pointing device to have drastically improved the latency.

I plug a Mac into a 120hz monitor with a high refresh rate mouse and it is gloriously snappy, snappier than any Windows PC I’ve ever used.

This is the biggest thing that irks me after coming from windows. Everything feels so sluggish. I wonder why the internet ist full of people complaining about that. I guess they just dont work fast enough to be bothered by that?

Yes, I hate how slow it is to swipe between desktop workspaces, for example.

>The thing where Linux (and Android, and Windows at least circa 2023) blows Apple out of the water is in UI latency.

I wouldn't expect that of Android because it's Java and Kotlin parts run in a VM and there's a garbage collector pausing the execution at times.