what on earth are you talking about? time is made up of seconds, minutes, hours... etc. reducing wait time increases productivity. The larger and more complex a project becomes, the more these delays compound. A sub $1k laptop with the the computational power of a workstation that costs many times that, and isn't portable is an absolute game changer in many areas. If I worked for National Geographic or the New York times as a photographer and needed to preprocess several thousand images or 4/8k footage from the field so I could make print deadlines, 3 hours vs overnight means everthing.And more importantly, the amount of power consumed by the cycles is far from trivial. An x86 mobile workstation can't even complete certain render tasks on a single charge that the macbook air can do on less than a quarter of a battery charge.

As for compile times, believe it or not, lots of projects are written in something other than highly optimized C code and compile time is a real pain point. You don't always have a choice of what language or dependencies you work with.

Just because there is an alternative way to do something, or a way that takes longer doesn't mean its viable. Performance improvements matter, a lot. Power consumption improvements matter, a lot.