The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

Is one or two hours of two engineers' time more than zero hours, or no?

> just a little learning up front

Is a little learning more than zero learning, or no?

IMO your argument would hold a lot more weight if people felt like their software (as users) is slow, but many people do not. Save for a few applications, I would prefer they keep their same performance profile and improve their feature set than spend any time doing the reverse. And as you have said multiple times now: it does indeed take time!

If your original position was what it is now, which is "there's low hanging fruit," I wouldn't disagree. But what you said is there's no tradeoff. And of course now you are saying there is a tradeoff... so now we agree! Where any one person should land on that tradeoff is super project-specific, so not sure why you're being so assertive about this blanket statement lol.

i argue that what we have today is the so called next best thing - free market capitalism, with a good dose of democracy and strong gov't regulations (but not overbearing).

This is exactly what I'm talking about. When I'm actually using my computer, its orders of magnitude faster. Things where I'd do one click and then practically have to walk away and come back to see if it worked happen in 100ms now. This is the machine being way faster and far more responsive.

Like, OK, some Apple IIe had 30ms latency on a key press compared to 50ms on a Haswell desktop with a decent refresh rate screen or 100ms on some Thinkpad from 2017, assuming these machines aren't doing anything.

But I'm not usually doing nothing when I want to press the key. I've got dozens of other things I want my computer to do. I want it listening for events on a few different chat clients. I want it to have several dozen web pages open. I want it to stream music. I want it to have several different code editors open with linters examining my code. I want it paying attention if I get new mail. I want it syncing directories from this machine to other machines and cloud storage. I want numerous background agents handling tons of different things. Any one of those tasks would cause that Apple IIe to crawl instantly and it doesn't even have the memory to render a tiny corner of my screen.

The computer is orders of magnitude "faster", in that it is doing many times as much work much faster even when it's seemingly just sitting there. Because that's what we expect from our computers these days.

Tell me how fast a button press is when you're on a video call on your Apple IIe while having a code linter run while driving a 4K panel and multiple virtual desktops. How's its Unicode support?

They did build a large part of those products, Keyhole is just a part of Google earth google maps in general has many more features than that.

For example driving around cars in every country that allowed it to take street photos is really awesome and nobody else does that even today. Google did that, not some company they aquired, they built it.

I'm far faster changing my WiFi network with the new quick settings menu than going Start > Control Panel > Network and Sharing Center (if using Vista or newer) > Network Devices > right click network adapter > Connect / Disconnect > go through Wizard process to set up new network. Now I just click the quick settings, click the little arrow to list WiFi networks, choose the network, click connect. Way faster.

I'm also generally far faster finding whatever setting in the Settings menu over trying to figure out which tab on which little Control Panel widget some obscure setting is, because there's a useful search box that will pull up practically any setting these days. Sure, maybe if you had every setting in Control Panel memorized you could be faster, but I'm far faster just searching for the setting I'm looking for at the moment for anything I'm not regularly changing.

The new Settings area, now that it actually has most things, is generally a far better experience unless you had everything in Control Panel committed to muscle memory. I do acknowledge though there are still a few things that aren't as good, but I imagine they'll get better. For most things most users actually mess with on a regular basis, it seems to me the Settings app is better than Control Panel. The only thing that really frustrates me with Settings now on a regular basis is only being able to have one instance of the app open at a time, a dumb limitation.

Every time I'm needing to mess with something in ancient versions of Windows these days is now a pain despite me growing up with it. So many things nested in non-obvious areas, things hidden behind tab after tab of settings and menus. Right click that, go to properties, click that, go to properties on that, click that button, go to the Options tab, click Configure, and there you go that's where you set that value. Easy! Versus typing something like the setting you want to set into the search box in Settings and have it take you right to that setting.