Anything more than roughly 10ms from the key being depressed to the display updating is not normal on a Mac.
If you’re seeing 500ms that’s either something specific to Chrome (the timing is slow enough I’d believe a network call for something like spell checking or suggestions) or some kind of extension interfering with the normal system behavior. I’ve heard about that with some security software so it can be useful to report those as bugs.
It's not specific to chrome, it's just worse in chrome. Iterm doesn't have this problem, but pretty much everything else I use does: intellij, slack, chrome, Firefox.
We use crowdstrike, but even before that I had this problem.
My mac is just painfully slow, if I start docker it becomes almost unusable. This is a 2019 Intel one, btw, it might not be so bad on m1s, but when I got the job (and the mac) , only the original one external monitor m1s were available.
Interesting, there's definitely something abnormal about that system — the old 2012 Mac Book Air I used to use still has an order of magnitude better latency than what you're reporting.
If I owned that I'd run a full hardware diagnostic[1] and would strongly consider doing a clean wipe and reinstall. One easy thing to try would be booting in recovery mode[2] and seeing what the latency is like in the built-in applications there after it starts up. If that's normal speed, you could create a new user and see if that's affected to see whether it's something like a problem with the spelling dictionary, etc. (it's possible that this has nothing to do with text input and is just a general problem, too, but that's the first thing which came to mind).
