
Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days - mmaanniisshh
https://www.buzzfeed.com/pranavdixit/big-tech-apps-for-the-next-billion-underperform
======
osrec
We have a lot of Indian users use our PWA
([https://usebx.com/app](https://usebx.com/app)), so we tried to optimise for
low end phones. Generally, we found that animations still run reasonably
smoothly. The trick was to be really careful not to carry out too much layout
thrashing, and use GPU accelerated CSS animations wherever possible. On some
of the cheapest devices, we got our animation running as smooth as a Galaxy
Note or iPhone. Just goes to show that if you don't over-bloat your app, even
low end phones can offer a very good experience.

~~~
untog
I've been surprised by how performant you can get with CSS transitions and a
will-change property. But good grief is it _difficult_.

On one hand I understand why a transition on `left` isn't hardware accelerated
but a `translate3d` is, but on the other it seems crazy that we expect people
to think and know this kind of stuff when they just want to do something very
simple.

~~~
bgirard
That's was my intention when I proposed will-changed. I was trying to get the
Firefox OS home screen slide transitions to be performant without hard coding
it in the Gecko layout engine.

~~~
untog
Thank you for proposing it! I was astonished by the difference when I used it.

------
code_duck
I did an experiment similar to this a few years back, but I lasted about six
months. After touchscreen on my iPhone 6 Plus died prematurely two days after
the warranty expired, and neither Apple nor Verizon would help, I decided to
simply forgo owning a smartphone for a while. I used one on WiFi only, and
went back to an LCD flip phone from 2002. This worked great, except people
kept complaining that they couldn’t text me. I try to get sms set up, but they
said my phone was too old to work with their current network.

Then I moved somewhere new and wanted to do some dating. It was obvious I was
going to need a real phone. I bought a Kyocera Hydro for $40. It has similar
specs to the device in the review - 1 GB ram, 1 GB clock speed, 2 MP camera:
[https://www.gsmchoice.com/en/catalogue/kyocera/hydroreach/Ky...](https://www.gsmchoice.com/en/catalogue/kyocera/hydroreach/Kyocera-
Hydro-Reach.html)

My first impression was that it was amazing to get a device like this for $40,
if you put it in a perspective from 5 or 15 years ago. Out of the box, though,
the system couldn’t keep up with typing. Simply entering text was a strain on
the processor. In general though, it seemed roughly as capable as an iPod
Touch G4, though with inferior system software, but less capable than a
Samsung Galaxy S3. I would complain about the buggy firmware and apps but it
seems no worse than Motorola or Samsung, who are each poor in the regard
compared to Apple. The main drawback was the camera. Battery life on it is
still better than my current iPhone. Reception is poor.

To make a long story short, after using the phone for six months, I realized
that I should’ve just bought an iPhone 4s for $50. I would have had at the
least a good camera and OS updates.

~~~
bo1024
It's not a hardware problem. Typing worked just fine on Windows 95 withd 8 MB
of RAM and 50MHz processor.

~~~
code_duck
If you installed Windows 7 on that machine it would probably be slow, though.
I think this one was running Android 4 when new. Probably it would have been
better with a version made a few years earlier. I looked into rooting it to
install a more lightweight OS, but this was my first experience with that and
it doesn't seem to be a popular phone to hack.

------
andy_ppp
I remember buying a burner phone in India once and it hurt my ears when I
received calls. It turned out the phone only had one loudness setting which
was at a level able to pierce through the din of Mumbai. Ear bleedingly loud.

~~~
chiph
Well, except when I'm indoors, I wouldn't mind that. The few times I've had to
call 911 by the side of the road to report accidents[1], the phones I had just
couldn't produce sound loudly enough to be heard over passing traffic. I know
there was an initiative to protect people's hearing a few years ago by
limiting volume - but sometimes you really need it.

[1] Other people's - not mine!

------
ranji2612
This is probably an extreme example to use Bharat 2(which most considers a
failed project) and using light apps on top of that. Choosing a budget phone
does not mean choosing the cheapest one. Honestly i don't know anyone who uses
the phone they mentioned, more phones from Honor or Xiaomi or Moto etc are
more common. Its hard for me to have exact data on this, so this is just based
on my experience.

~~~
bigdaddyrabbit
It was a best selling phone in India last year. People are using it, just not
people in your social circle.

~~~
mayankkaizen
I too have never seen anybody using it in at least North India. In fact, I
never ever heard anyone even talking about it. Unlike many people here, I am
actually very close to rural life in India and I couldn't spot this phone.
South India may be?

I don't know how it was the best selling phone in India.

~~~
KrishnaAnaril
I live in Kerala (South India) and I haven't seen this phone with anyone. Most
of them uses budget phones from Samsung which costs around 5k-8k INR.

------
poulsbohemian
I think his expectations are just out of balance. The phone he describes
sounds a lot like the phone I gave my kids. I just want them to have a _phone_
that they can use in case of emergencies. That's basically what my baby boomer
parents need as well. So he's right, phones at that price point are limited,
but that doesn't mean they don't fulfill the needs of portions of the
population - just different demographics than his own personal needs.

~~~
jpatokal
If you _really_ need just calls, dumbphones are still a thing, and I see
plenty for sale here in provincial China (/me waves from Xining). The
article's point is that cheap smartphones aren't working well for their
intended users because the vast majority of apps aren't designed for their
limitations.

~~~
oneTimePeet
Well, this should be easy- open the Git-Repository from five years ago,
compile the old version of the app and release.

The irony is - you cant do that, because maybe, just maybee all your current
users would drop the HOT NEW SHINY, bloat-add-ware in the store, like a hot
rock, if they could go back to something basic- basically have the whats-app
experience, before the feature bloat came.

------
vidanay
I'd be interested to know how these $60 phones perform compared to a 9 year
old Motorola Droid. Obviously, the level of content 9 years ago was at least
an order of magnitude less than today, but how much of these devices slowness
is content vs delivery technology? Is it because web apps are dynamic instead
of static? Is it a matter of framework bloat? What is really the root cause of
the terrible performance?

~~~
hayksaakian
Operating system bloat and app bloat.

A motorola droid was super fast, I had it for years.

If you made a brand new motorola droid today with the same exact hardware and
software it would be too.

Here's a chart showing apk bloat for popular apps over time:
[https://sensortower.com/blog/ios-app-size-
growth](https://sensortower.com/blog/ios-app-size-growth)

It's for iOS but the same logic follows for android

~~~
st26
Is ProGuard or similar widely used these days? Is it good enough?

There was a parallel trend of some really awesome apps clocking less than 4MB,
which I attribute to good tooling. I wonder if Gmail, Facebook, et al have
stripping & such turned off, or if they just have huge asset stores?

------
kumarm
iPhone User with a $900 phone switches to a $60 phone and frustrated that it
doesn't perform as well a $900 phone while trying to use it like a Premium
phone?

I am surprised :).

~~~
amorphid
I went through that process. After I stopped buy good phones subsidized by the
phone company & started paying full retail phones upfront, I became less
interested in having a top of the line phone. I just don't wanna fork out $900
for any phone. I bought two versions of a sub-$100 phone, they both sucked
and/or were defective in some way. I bought a $240, and it was OK, but I was
constantly fishing for an excuse to get rid of it. I finally came to the
conclusion that I had to spend about at least $400 for a phone I'd be happy
with (I wanted new + 32GB internal storage + not-crappy camera + removable
battery). That strategy has worked well for me so far!

~~~
danieldk
I disagree, it can be done below $400. The first two generations of the Moto G
where really awesome for the price (< $200). They had vanilla Android,
frequent updates, reasonably good screens and were fast. I used one for a
while full time while my Moto X was being repaired. And I briefly considered
switching to the G full time because it had some nice features (could be
bought with dual SIM and had a bumper available that could replace the back).
Unfortunately, quickly after Lenovo bought Motorola, they diversified the
product line and the quick updates stopped.

Currently, Nokia (they are not really Nokia, but have ex-Nokia staff and are a
Finnish company) makes really great Android phones around $200-$300. They are
in the Android One program and do 2 years of feature updates and monthly
security updates. So far, it seems that they are keeping up this promise.
Phones like the Nokia 6.1 are fast, have a nice screen, etc. Obviously, it is
not a $700 phone, but speed/quality/update-wise they are very similar to the
old Nexus line.

~~~
nl
I recently bought a Nokia 3 for testing stuff on. It's $179 outright in
Australia (so US$150ish) and I've been pretty impressed.

It's slow, but usable. Pure Android, and ok camera, screen and build quality.

(My daily phone is a Pixel, and I have had iPhones in the past to compare)

~~~
danieldk
They released the 3.1 in May and it seems that they bumped up the specs quite
a bit (4 to 8 core, 2 to 3GB RAM, 32GB storage).

[https://www.phonearena.com/phones/compare/Nokia-3.1,Nokia-3/...](https://www.phonearena.com/phones/compare/Nokia-3.1,Nokia-3/phones/10902,10433)

Last week I bought a Nokia 6.1 and it is pretty fast. I have been an iPhone
user since 2009 (with an Android excursion 2013-2015). But my beloved 64GB
iPhone SE had water damage after a bike ride through the rain last week. And I
didn't want to buy a new iPhone just ~2 months before the keynote. I'll see
after the keynote whether I'll buy a/the new iPhone or whether the Nokia is
good enough.

At any rate, I am very impressed what they are doing. I hope they stay on this
course. I think there is a place for phones with pure Android and regular
updates, but that is cheaper than the Pixel line. Basically the void that
Nexus left.

------
hfdgiutdryg
This reminds me of when Apple said they would refurbish older phone models and
sell them in India and people got irate that they only sell them used stuff.
So, okay, no iPhone for them at all, I guess.

They're basically stuck using older, cheaper technology. That's fine, but you
can't really access the older software that was developed for that level of
hardware anymore (hence the 'lite' apps mentioned in the article). It's an
interesting disconnect between hardware and software in the market.

------
zhte415
The article talks a lot about storage. Is an SD card not possible? I have a
somewhat average Huawei phone that's a couple of years old (sensible charging,
battery still good though not great) and a 32GB SD card carries all I need in
terms of photo after photo, and app data from less used apps.

~~~
toast0
SD cards on Androids are kind of weird. It's not always consistent where
things will be stored. Unless things have changed, many apps can't be
installed to SD (and if you force it, you'll find that they are subtly
broken). When you're building the phone to hit a low price point, you might
not have the budget for a slot anyway; and unfortunately, you're likely to not
put much more storage than is needed to boot the phone; let alone handle the
play store updates that will be ready when it's unboxed.

It would really help if Google made translations suck less. They are stored
uncompressed in the apk, even though human language text is easily compressed.

~~~
StudentStuff
Back in the early Android days, this wasn't the case, you could easily push
most apps onto MicroSD. Yet, versions of Android up until adoptable storage
was added (which essentially makes your mSD non-removable) have continued to
make it more and more difficult to use your MicroSD for storing apps.

------
hesarenu
So its just best selling phone under $75 not the best selling mobile which i
would take would be Samsung or Xiaomi.

------
spiritcat
Had to buy a $79.99 Blu C5 at target last minute few weeks ago when my phone
died night before I had to catch a flight. Everything is really crappy and
really slow, but so far perfectly usable.

Still been using it last few weeks since I can't decide which phone to get. If
it had a slightly better speaker I'd prob keep it. Guess my needs aren't that
demanding in hindsight.

~~~
joe_the_user
I used $50 alcatel phone for the last four years. It was actually pretty nice
for the first three years, it wasn't even slow for many purposes (though
cruising the web was annoying). That it's screen was 1/3 normal size helped -
sped things up and made the phone much tougher.

The phone was killed in the last year by the gradual process of applications
upgrading themselves and exceeding memory. And then the touch screen started
dying.

The cheapish thing I have does more but is not more aesthetically pleasing.

See: [https://medium.com/matter/shitphone-a-love-
story-a44e6643480...](https://medium.com/matter/shitphone-a-love-
story-a44e66434807)

------
joshvm
I've been using a Nokia 216 for a month while my smartphone gets repaired. It
has 4G and Bluetooth, but not WiFi (why?). It has a lousy camera, but the LED
torch is good. It has threaded texts (this is not common, apparently) and the
battery lasts forever even using data. There is no GPS nor, tragically, Snake.

You get Opera Mini installed which is... an experience. There is no cache (and
probably hardly any RAM either), so if you close the browser your entire
session gets deleted. History somewhat works. Every now and then you get an ad
injected - the ad never seems to change. My phone is trying to make me buy a
German Honor A10. I live in the UK.

Javascript, of course, is not supported. If you want to interact with an
element it refreshes the entire page and re-renders it to reflect the update.

It makes it painfully obvious which websites are _really_ optimised for
mobile, which ones just have a setting for small screens, and which don't
bother at all. Simple sites work well - HN comments is good, most news
websites (e.g. BBC) work, Wikipedia is fine. People are astounded when I can
fact-check in the pub. Browsing Google images is also surprisingly good. Pages
with custom fonts often don't load at all. Forms are hit and miss.

Data usage is really light. I have a 100MB bundle and I barely put a dent in
it.

It's, on the whole, usable. I can look up things, check the weather and
procrastinate.

What is really missing is maps. Google Maps does not work _at all_. The
interface doesn't work - if you get a list of possible destinations, often you
can't click on the one you actually want. There don't seem to be any usable
ultra-low bandwidth navigation websites. Bing doesn't even try, and not much
luck with Bing either.

If I had access to slack, 2-factor authentication (without using texts) and
semi-decent mapping, I'd be tempted not to go back to a smartphone.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
About 4 years ago, before my current employment made owning a smartphone a
necessity, I was a dumb phone user. I was able to easily give up Reddit, HN,
other various things but the single most painful missing thing to give up was
maps.

My approach at the time was to route on my laptop and print directions. It
worked most of the time but still was rather painful.

It ended up being a lot cheaper though. When I was a poor college kid I was
able to get on a prepaid plan with no data, unlimited text and like 200
minutes of calling a month (way more than almost anyone in this day and age
uses) for about $15 a month.

------
nsenifty
The chief complaint seems to be the lack of internal storage, but the phone
has an SD slot that supports cards up to 32GB while his shiny iPhone 8 has
exactly 0 GB expandable storage.

~~~
dizzystar
Except that's not how it works in the Android world. You have internal storage
that needs to be freed up to hold apps. When that memory runs out, that's it.
The SD card isn't for holding apps.

We used to root Android for this reason. We needed to free up silly apps no
one uses and we had to have the ability to aggressively clear out the system.

~~~
opencl
Android has supported apps on SD cards for ages. First with Apps2SD then since
6.0 Adoptable Storage which just treats internal+SD as one big storage pool. A
lot of higher end phones have disabled the UI for Adoptable Storage due to
performance concerns though it is still possible to set up with ADB commands.
This type of phone however is the exact sort of thing it's meant for.

------
paradite
The title is misleading and essentially a clickbait. Later in the article they
mentioned:

> At $60, the Bharat 2 is one of the cheapest smartphones in India with 4G LTE
> and, according to Counterpoint, it was the country’s best-selling smartphone
> in the sub-$75 price band last year.

------
derReineke
The author just can't seem to understand the concept that these phones are an
upgrade for most Indian users. He mentions it multiple times as if he
complained about it to literally everyone he interviewed.

------
hitekker
>Vikas Jain, Micromax’s cofounder, was not concerned when I brought this up to
him. “Our target customers are Indians who are buying their first smartphone,
or people who are upgrading to their first smartphone from a feature phone,”
he told me in a phone interview. “These people aren’t really bothered about
how fast the processor is, or how clear and rich the display is. Their needs
are a lot more...basic, and as long as they get decent battery life, a decent
camera, and a basic internet surfing experience, they are satisfied.”

A market ripe for disruption.

~~~
vedtopkar
How so? Seems like the features/specs provided line up pretty well with the
$60 price point. Are there examples of basic smartphones in this price range
with significantly better features? (Legitimately don't know)

------
bm1362
I work in mobile performance and have built out an automated testing workflow
for our CI system to try and prevent big breaking changes to these types of
phones.

The issue with testing these phones is the device introduces lots of variance
due to the low hardware standards. We typically test for relative changes in
key metrics and want to move to testing different types of phones for
usability. This is generally hard because the noise makes the test
inconclusive.

~~~
toredash
How do you this testing? Any public service?

~~~
bm1362
We have a lab environment with multiple phones plugged into a single
controller. The controller runs a set of Jenkins agents which advertises the
different devices as targets for Jenkins jobs.

Plus, lots of tweaking and perf related fixes to the phone. If you're looking
for an off-the-shelf solution, check out Headspin or the Google Cloud
offerings.

~~~
toredash
Thanks for the feedback. I'll look into headspin. I'm not into mobile
performance or testing so not sure how I would automate and log the
performance on different devices. Honestly I'm not sure what tools I would use
on the device to run the tests.

~~~
bm1362
We are trying to build something similar to CT-scan; except it’s a 1-man team
so it’s been a longer journey:

[https://code.fb.com/developer-tools/mobile-performance-
tooli...](https://code.fb.com/developer-tools/mobile-performance-tooling-
infrastructure-at-facebook/)

We run functional UI tests with a performance tracer wired up- we already had
them setup by feature teams so it was easy to get started. Instead of a
Zookeeper scheduler, it’s just Jenkins.

Right now we’ve been able to catch 2-3% relative regressions in things like
startup, opening a Google Maps view etc which is pretty good. It was easy to
setup and then hard to optimize the variance down so we could get a strong
signal.

We’re hiring if any of this is interesting, it’s Golang/San Francisco/Full-
Time.

------
bovermyer
...and here my age shows.

I remember a time when I used a physical landline phone as my only phone. I
didn't care if I missed a call, because the people that I wanted to talk to
either would see me at school the next day or would show up at my house if it
was important. Texting was nonexistent.

Or, to put it another way - eh, life goes on if you can't do a thing.

~~~
suprfnk
The problem is that times have changed. Back then the scenario you are
describing was everyone. Right now, if you were to go 'back' to that life, you
will be an outcast. People won't understand why you don't respond to their
messages. If you explain them, people have to make an exception in
communication just for you. That gets annoying, and you will be skipped over
easier.

~~~
bovermyer
No, the scenario back then was a group of maybe 60 people at most.

The scenario now is also a group of maybe 60 people. Those 60 people are not
so high strung as to require a response immediately.

My biggest problem with "downgrading" to a landline now would be the loss of
Google Maps, to be perfectly honest. I would lose none of the richness of
connection that I have now.

------
ricardobeat
Sounds like a terrible choice of phone, and I haven’t seen this model in the
actual top 10 list.

I’m currently testing a Redmi 5 (should retail for ~100, maybe less) and it is
impressive. Eight cores, great screen, fingerprint sensor, 3300mah battery,
all in a very nice package - only let down so far is the camera.

------
anewhnaccount2
Sounds like the assumptions of newer versions of Android and the ecosystem may
mean feature phones like the Jiophone (running the FirefoxOS successor) can be
competitive on the basis of the hardware and software actually being in step
with each other.

------
tim333
When I made an app I went and bought the cheapest Android I could find to
check the thing ran ok as I use an iPhone normally. It was quite interesting -
I made it display a bit less stuff and the UI less fiddly as the screen
response was bad. I think devs should in general try catering for the worst
devices and network connections. One reason WhatsApp won, especially in India,
was it worked as a java applet on old phones when the competition couldn't be
bothered with that.

I'm not convinced by the current trend of everything requiring a ton of
javascript frameworks to display some text info and similar. It causes issues
along those lines.

------
lucio
from the comments, don't kill the messenger

>Can I use this article as a case study for Journo students on 'How NOT to
approach a topic'? You took a wonderful subject and turned it into a gloating,
patrnonizing pile of crap. Bravo. The takeaways from this article essentially
are 'Cheaper products perform less efficiently than more expensive ones' and
'India is full of poor people'. Yep, right, We did not know this earlier.
Thanks for your investigative journalism.

~~~
tim333
That comment seem unfair, there's a lot of other stuff in the article.

------
Markoff
I was surprised the choice was not Xiaomi, the experience would be vastly
different for slightly more money

if writer would not set Pierce limit it Redmi note 4 should be best selling
phoned in India

~~~
known
[https://www.mi.com/in/redmi4/](https://www.mi.com/in/redmi4/) rocks

------
notjtrig
I'm writing this on a low end Android I bought 2 years ago for $25 bucks. ZTE
force n9100, 1 GB ram, 1.5 GHz android 4.1.2 It works great for browsing the
web and YouTube, havent tried anything else. It's just as responsive as any
phone if not more responsive. The problem the author has is with the software,
the hardware is exceptional in any phone, although 512 megs of ram may limit
it somewhat.

Has anyone ever done anything productive with a cellphone? I doubt it.

~~~
vanderZwan
The problem with the software eating up space is partially that Android itself
seems to assume a ton of storage space as soon as you go beyond Android 4. I
had an HTC Desire that I had to get rid of simply because the Play Store kept
upgrading itself and eating up all remaining storage

------
xkcdefgh
It's misleading to call it one of the bestselling phones in India. This
article is the first time I even heard about this phone.

It's just a bit below the price of the cheapest xiaomi, which is miles better,
and can arguably be used as a less shiny i-phone replacement

------
bgorman
A common problem with low end devices is specs that make no sense. Why does
this device have a quad core processor? I bet this phone would perform much
better if they used a slower processor but doubled the memory. It's crazy that
Android is so bloated that 1 gig of storage isn't enough.

------
wuunderbar
Great article I'm glad to see at least one tech giant is (attempting) to cater
towards low-end smart phones:

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/instagram-
lite/](https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/instagram-lite/)

~~~
saagarjha
Google has been doing similar things as well with their "Go" series of apps.
Relaunching web app wrappers as lightweight apps is nothing new.

------
spraak
> According to data from app analytics firm App Annie, Indians spend 36% of
> their screentime on communication (like WhatsApp), 20% on video players
> (like YouTube), and 16% on social networking (Facebook).

I wonder how much of that is self fulfilling due to the low powered devices?

~~~
iKSv2
Most, I mean upwards of 60-70% always search for charging point the first
thing they arrive anywhere (be it airport, Hotel or even office). Always the
devices are on charge. Always.

------
ggg9990
This is the tech equivalent of slum tourism. News flash: poor people deal with
crap that rich people don’t have to.

~~~
peatmoss
I hear that, but there’s something instructive here as well for members of the
HN community who write software.

Namely, it’s that sometimes performance and optimization matter. Given the
size of the Indian / developing world market, I wonder if there’s an
opportunity to provide a good experience (apps or OS) on more meager hardware.

I certainly don’t remember the first gen iPhone being painful or slow. Why
can’t we make an experience today that runs on low end, but still vastly more
powerful hardware than the original iPhone?

~~~
Ezhik
I think there's just a problem with software nowadays. I bought a 2005
PowerBook G4 for nostalgia's sake, and ended up finding out that even if I
push the CPU of the poor thing to the max by compiling GCC and downloading
stuff, it still manages to have smoother animations than my maxed out quad-
core i7-powered Dell XPS 15:
[https://twitter.com/SilverEzhik/status/1017622599696896001](https://twitter.com/SilverEzhik/status/1017622599696896001)

~~~
peatmoss
Try installing OpenBSD (or even Xubuntu) with XFCE on that i7 Dell. It’ll fly.
Resource sipping, featureful software exists.

------
vedanthbekal
Buzzfeed, quartz, dailyO are all clickbait opinion articles.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3hf1hn/hey_india_wha...](https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3hf1hn/hey_india_what_are_the_bad_newspapers_and_online/)

------
vedanthbekal
Biased article.

The phone is really really basic and designed for light apps and light
browsing and is being compared to iPhone 8.

------
HIPisTheAnswer
The problem here is mostly the piece of s __* Android OS. 1gb of storage is
enough for a complete OS(100mb) and user files. 256mb ram and 500mhz single
core is enough to drive a good OS without very much latency. And we only need
a few functionalities (communicate and record) ... The 1000000 apps are a
symptom we are confused about how computers work best. In time, we will have
to figure this out, or we will have deserved to lose this tech.

~~~
userbinator
Or in general, blame software bloat and the developers who push this sordid
movement of inefficiency upon everyone else.

A 1.3GHz quad-core with 512MB of RAM _should_ be plenty powerful for what
people use smartphones for; it wasn't too long ago when the typical _desktop
PC_ was around that specification (albeit only a single core) --- and yet,
people used them for watching videos, VoIP/IM/video chat, and otherwise most
of the things that smartphones would usually be used for today. At least, I
could remember doing those things comfortably on a 733MHz PIII with 256MB of
RAM.

 _Scrolling through my Twitter timeline was a stuttering, jerky mess, despite
Twitter 's claims to “load quickly on slower connections.”_

I absolutely do not fathom how we got to the point where basic functionality
like displaying some text and images seems to take far more processing power
than they did years ago, and yet no one notices and tries to put a stop to it.

IMHO something is very wrong when apps that do seemingly trivial things are
multiple megabytes; surely one does not need _millions_ of bytes of code to
open a browser window to a website or implement IM functionality, for example.
When software came on floppies, size was measured in kilobytes and a 1MB app
was _huge_ and accordingly did quite a lot.

~~~
kwhitefoot
> people used them for watching videos, VoIP/IM/video chat,

I used a 260 MHz Win98SE for VOIP and video chat a long time ago (when Win98SE
was current).

No one cares about efficiency any more.

