I remember doing voice and video calls, and of course IM, on a PC with 128MB of RAM and a single core CPU around the turn of the century. It's amazing how far we've regressed in efficency.
> It's amazing how far we've regressed in efficency. I don’t think we have. This is always what efficiency leads to, higher resource consumption. The phenomenon was described already in the 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox JS and the web has seen performance improvements. They lead to more ads being served and more code being released faster to users.
That's not the same thing. If you make batteries more efficient then people build more devices that run on batteries and then you need more batteries than ever. But you also get a bunch of new devices you didn't used to have.
When computers get more efficient, miserly corporations cut staff or hire less competent programmers and force their customers to waste the efficiency gains on that, because they don't have enough competition or the customers are locked in by a network effect. The difference is whether you actually get something for it instead of having it taken from you so somebody else can cheap out.