[david-gpu]

> Proof that modern programming can be massively wasteful on resources

Alternatively, consider the possibility that what a smartphone does is a lot more computationally complex than you realize.

Disclaimer: I worked on smartphone chips for many years, including the Qualcomm chip that ended in Mars.

[RugnirViking]

the two sentiments are one and the same; the phone does indeed do a lot: I can observe that it is slow to load things. Thats because it's doing computationally complex things. The problem is I don't want it to be doing computationally complex things. I want to use an irc chat equivalent. The reasons behind it may be all sorts of fancy features im not using - the engineers that made those tradeoffs on my behalf, collectively, have added up to an enormous amount of wasted processor power.

The things that seem the most computationally complex, like viewing hd video streamed over the internet in realtime, work fine on my phone. But mundane tasks I know shouldn't by any rights be complex regularly take forever to complete. Because they're probably negotiating some nonsense protocol for the bluetooth headphones I connected three weeks ago while facebook tries to access my gps signal for the tenth time this second while sending an updated list of every gesture, tap, and scroll to thousands of separate parties, each individually as a separate task

[david-gpu]

> The problem is I don't want it to be doing computationally complex things. I want to use an irc chat equivalent

Have you considered the possibility that the phone is doing what most phone users want, and that their needs being more complex than yours doesn't mean that "programming can be massively wasteful on resources"? Instead, the phone you purchased is not fit for your purposes.

> But mundane tasks I know shouldn't by any rights be complex regularly take forever to complete

It is also possible that what it takes to complete that task is somewhat more complex these days than you realize. Not because it's poorly programmed, but because the software is designed to support many more features than you are currently using. An individual user may only rely on 5% of the features, but different users want a different set of 5%. Supporting other people's needs isn't any more wasteful than supporting your needs.