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Jobs's whole meeting: press the button
The story comes from one of the books about Apple. The team was nervous, because Jobs had a commanding presence, and they expected an hour-long meeting.
He walked in and showed them the laptop. He asked if it was on, and when the button was pressed, it came on. He pressed it again and it went off immediately. Then he tried to open the MacBook, and there was a delay.
He told the team to make this like that, and walked out of the room. That was the whole meeting. The history of Apple has a lot of examples like it.
Why do tiny delays bother users so much?
Usability researcher Jakob Nielsen summarized long-standing findings on response times. About 0.1 seconds feels instantaneous, 1 second keeps a person's flow of thought unbroken, and 10 seconds is the limit of holding their attention. A laptop that hesitates when its lid opens lands in the range where the delay is noticed. Nielsen drew these limits from earlier work by Robert Miller in 1968 and by Stuart Card and colleagues in 1991.
How do laptops wake up so quickly from sleep?
In sleep mode, a laptop keeps its memory powered while almost everything else shuts down. Waking it only restores power to the processor and screen, because the open programs are still sitting in memory. Hibernation works differently: it writes the contents of memory to disk and powers off completely. Reading that saved image back from storage is the reason hibernation takes longer to resume than sleep.
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