Right, and consider how many transformations happen to the data between the network call and the screen. In a modern app it's likely coming in as raw bytes, going through a JSON decoder (possibly with a detour through a native string type), likely getting marshaled into hash tables and arrays before being shoved into more specific model types, then pass that data along to a fully Unicode-aware text renderer that does high quality vector graphics.... There's a lot in there that could be incredibly slow. But since it's not, we can write a few lines of code to make all of this happen and not worry about optimization.