In fairness, I do notice the time to connect to my home network much more when waking my Macbook Pro from sleep than my iPad. But it is still noticeable on the iPad.

The place where the slowness is most noticeable on iPad is when I want to reconnect it to my iPhone's hotspot. I need to reconnect many times per day because the iPhone turns off the hotspot when its unused for 90 seconds to save battery, and this behavior infuriatingly cannot be disabled.

I notice it all the time. The delay is really annoy when you go in an elevator (so no cell signal) and wait for it to reconnect to your wifi when you step out.

Apple stuff connects faster. Some folks say they "cheat." I think by assuming the connection established before it got a proper reply.

Other OSs don't do that, so it seems like it takes a longer time.

Last time I looked into this, I seem to remember that the Wifi protocol actually had ridiculous hard-coded wait times, e.g, broadcast, listen for 500 ms, then move to next step if nothing heard. I remember being baffled and never understood how that it could possibly be really how it worked, so I definitely might have been misinterpreting.

Dual-band (one device using both 2.4GHz and 5GHz) has existed for over a decade.