I'm not ignoring them. I just didn't mention them in this comment. They fit in the same rubric.

A user can run a few things even on the low-end netbook. Tabs are cheap. And if they hit the limits of their machine, they can either pay in a reasonable number of user-minutes to actively manage resources or a modest number labor-hours to get something beefier.

I personally would like to see things better optimized. After all, I started programming on a computer with 4K of RAM. But I recognize that there is very little economic incentive to do so.

Isn't it kind of offensive to suppose that billions of users should pay more money so that hundreds of developers can use less efficient tools to build apps?

Isn't this backwards?

If those are the only factors and the numbers fall in particular ranges, sure. Otherwise, no.

Try doing the math here. How much cheaper would a netbook get if every single developer coordinated to reduce RAM and CPU usage? $5? Maybe $10? Looking at market prices, old RAM and CPUs are cheap. They consume basically the same physical resources as new RAM and CPUs, so price competition for not-the-best hardware is fierce.

Now ask those people if they'd pay $5 or $10 more for assorted new software features. Any features they can think of. And keep in mind that in that price range, people are paying $10 more to pick the color of their computer.

So sure, it offends me a little, because I like optimizing the things I pay attention to, like RAM usage. But if instead I optimize for the sorts of the things users care about, especially as reflected by what they'll actually pay for it becomes pretty clear: users don't care about the things I do.

So then the moral question becomes for me: who am I to impose my aesthetic choices on the people I'm trying to serve?

Trivializing making bad software that is slower on devices orders of magnitude faster by trying to equate it to netbook prices is a particularly bad methodology of comparison.

This is especially true as people are promoting everyone moving to a platform that is substantially worse.

How about getting more performance and battery life out of the same machine which effects more than netbook users.

I am not trivializing anything. I don't like bad software any more than you. However.

You may have noticed that we are in the technology industry. That means the final measure of our work is economic. The final judges of our work are our customers.

If you believe that X is better in our industry, you must be able to demonstrate that betterness in terms of user economics, in terms of user experience. You haven't yet, and you seem unwilling to even grapple with my argument in those terms. Are you planning on trying?

I dunno. When I was overseas I had a Kindle which lasted for something like two weeks between charges; that was awesome. Much better than my laptop which I had to charge every day for hours.

I wouldn't mind a true low-power laptop which only needed a charge twice a month.

Eink displays only use however much the battery inherently loses when not changing pages. If you only read 500 screen of text that month then it only consumed a trickle of battery x 500. Your screen itself consumes power every second its on and you also ask much more than rendering text.

What you propose is interesting though none the less. What is the most battery life that can reasonably be packed into a device that is modest but still useful.

Sure, but that won't come from people programming differently. The laptop backlight alone is a few watts. If your battery is 40 watt-hours, you're not going to get to 2 weeks of usage no matter how little the CPU gets used.