> "so that's 200ms, for the whole device to go from non-powered to fully working animation."

That's 200ms more than 0ms, which is the status quo for dumb devices.

> "yet, it's still fast enough that I can't perceive any delay."

Right, because the inputs aren't on-screen. Touchscreen devices inject more delay because you have to:

- wake the device

- read the output

- decide on input

- press the input

With a device like your microwave (or your arcade game) steps 1 and 2 don'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.

And this is also why this is fundamentally a product design problem that isn'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.

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't get - injecting additional steps 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.

Have you ever tried to set one of those digital mains timers? The designers always seem to leave a couple of buttons off, so the buttons all do three things, and you can never be sure which mode you're in - and I know people who have no problem writing code who have given up on them and bought a mechanical timer instead.

Now, you could have a single home control display - or perhaps a single display in every room. And they'd all show the same information, maybe customised for each room, and include a few extra pages for setting up timers, lights, proximity sensors, or whatever.

There are plenty of applications for this kind of IoT, but the tech just hasn't come together yet. I think the lack of good, cheap, large, low-energy displays is more of an issue than wake up times - because if the display uses very little energy, you can skip the wake up time.

You can more or less pick any two from the list, but getting all four seems to be impossible for now.

I honestly think it's less about the energy usage of the displays and more about the general visual annoyance of typical computer displays.

Sure, yes, one reason we keep displays off most of the time is because of their usage, but more and more so it's the secondary reason - there are lots of power efficient displays nowadays that can maintain an always-on screen at relatively low power cost, and smarthome devices generally aren't reliant on battery power.

But the bigger problem is that LCD displays are ugly. They are backlit, and their response to better lighting in the room is to increase its own strength to make itself even more apparent. They are ugly, obnoxious, and annoying in the same way blinking router lights are, but multiplied several times over.

So we keep them off - we can afford to keep them on, but the fact that we keep them off 99% of the time less environmental consciousness but more an acknowledgment that they're visually noisy, distracting, and just kind of don't fit in. When you walk into a room you don't want your attention immediately drawn to this LCD panel on the wall with its pale glow.

E-ink fortunately doesn't suffer from this problem. It's clearly legible, doesn't require backlighting, and more importantly doesn't appear distractingly electronic in everyday use. You can afford to keep an always-on e-ink display, not just because of its low power use, but because it won't be this annoying glow in your peripheral vision always.