Even in the 90s, you could just power it on and it would show image near-instantly. Warm-up time and channel switch time were all firmly under one second. With the exception of cable TV set-top boxes, which were separate devices and first to include the ridiculous boot times and delays, that still would seem blazingly fast compared to what we have today...

Go back in time a little more and there was definitely "warm up" time for electonics. Tubes had to get up to operating temp, etc. When I was a kid I remember turning on the TV about ten minutes before my dad got home so it would be warmed up and ready for him to watch the evening news.

Let's just say the 70ies to 80ies were peak of consumer electronics, then? With the exception of digital photography, computers, mobiles...

Well, that sounds accurate. Especially when it comes to heavier hardware, such as car, trucks, farm equipment... Digital photography, computers and mobiles are young, but arguably, in 2023, they're past their peak.

My take is this: the peak is at the point when a given product category existed long enough to be thoroughly developed, but short enough that value engineering didn't kick in yet to ruin it.

I used to have cable TV without box (direct stuff via analog cable) until mid-2000s, and man, 15-ish years forward, the order of magnitude slower channel zapping still bothers me as hell.

(To be fair though, nowadays we have UHD/4K channels, which need way more bandwidth than the SD TV quality from 2000s. I wonder if this could be fixed with a more powerful CPU in those boxes? maybe it could, but might increase power usage?).

Those "instant ON" TVs worked by sending a small pulse of power through the tube/valve circuitry. There was a legal stink when a Zenith TV set caused the Texas Capitol to burn in 1983. The "expert" testifying for Zenith claimed that no other TV burst into flames like that. The Texas AG had gotten copies of sealed testimony by that exact same expert in dozens of other home fires. The expert got busted for perjury.

The immediacy of analog is so nice compared to the constant lag of software.

Audio effects and synthesizers all have software driven versions that sound effectively identical to analog and are typically cheaper. Yet, analog has been hanging on due to the simplicity and immediacy.