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by nothrabannosir 3463 days ago
> With the increasing popularity of Electron based apps, average power consumption is probably even increasing.

I can only hope OS vendors (both mobile and desktop) will one day be driven to actually incentivise frugal use of resources. We are currently suffering a massive tragedy of the commons for RAM, cpu and even disk I/O (see Spotify, recently).

I would be absolutely thrilled if, just for example, App Store margins were calculated based on median resource usage. Or if apps got a clear UI annotation indicating resource use. Or something... anything. Like a carbon tax, but for software :)

Currently it's the Wild West out there, the cpu tuna is being massively overfished and we don't put the blame with the right parties so why would anyone stop. We the consumers end up paying for all this.

Edit: and if google could do the same with search ranking I would convert to any religion you asked me to.
1 comments
mtw 3463 days ago
This makes sense for iPad or the 12" MacBook but not for MacBook pros. I invest a lot of money in a MacBook Pro for work and it makes sense the apps I'm using needs more RAM, CPU and graphics card usage.

If the thinness of current MacBook pros prevent them on displaying remaining battery time, then making the MacBook pros thinner was not a good decision. You can make the regular MacBooks thinner but not the MacBook pros -- unless Apple finds another battery material that outputs significantly more power per cubic cm

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nothrabannosir 3463 days ago
> I invest a lot of money in a MacBook Pro for work and it makes sense the apps I'm using needs more RAM, CPU and graphics card usage.

100% agreed. The crucial word there is "I". You choose. You get to decide what to think of wasteful apps. Text editor in Electron? Well you're a programmer, so ok. No hard feelings. Image editor using up 50% of your cpu? I'll look for a different one. Might be just the other way around for a graphic designer.

The important part is: let the market figure out what is the balance of acceptable resource usage. Right now, there is no accountability. Spotify was trashing the disk for about a year and finally got off their asses to fix it when it became a serious pr issue. That is not a sustainable system.

Edit: to drive the point home about your mbp: I have one too, and I actually don't think it's acceptable for apps to use a lot of cpu / gpu. I'm on battery a lot and I constantly monitor the tasklist to shut apps that are using too much. Already in n=2, you and I have different preferences. And that's great! Let us collectively figure out a balance like a normal market does :).

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j-pb 3463 days ago
You are not getting OPs point I think. He's talking about efficiency not overall resource usage. When people code in electron and embed an entire friggin browser into their application just so that they don't have to port their webapp or so that they can apply their webdev skills, you the user gain nothing.

These apps don't do more, they do less but require more resources. They trade user convenience for developer convenience.

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