[wkjagt]

I recently started looking for a new(er) laptop, because it often felt slow. But I started looking at when it was slow, and it was mostly when using things like GMail. I guess my feeling was "if my laptop isn't even fast enough for email, it's time to upgrade". But doing things I actually care about (coding, compiling) it's actually totally fine, so I'm going to hold on to it a bit longer.

[Sanygeek]

This is the exact feeling I had. My 2019 intel MacBook Pro has 12 cores, 32gb ram and a 1TB hard drive. Yet, most consumer web apps like Gmail, Outlook and Teams are excruciatingly slow.

What is surprising is that a few years ago, these apps weren’t so terrible on this exact hardware.

I’m convinced that there’s an enormous amount of bloat right at the application framework level.

I finally caved and bought a new M series Mac and the apps are much snappier. But this is simply because the hardware is wicked fast and not because the software got any better.

I really wish consumer apps cared less about user retention and focused more on user empowerment.

[iknowstuff]

All it would take is forcing an artificial CPU slowdown to something like a 5 year old CPU when testing/dogfooding apps for developers to start caring about performance more.

[small_scombrus]

> All it would take is forcing an artificial CPU slowdown

Technically, yes. But for many large tech companies it would require a large organisational mindset shift to go from more features is more promotions is more money to good, stable product with well maintained codebase is better and THAT would require a dramatic shift away from line must go up to something more sustainable and less investor/stock obsessed.

[rayiner]

The software bloat is starting to outpace the hardware folks' best efforts. iOS 27 runs like ass on my year-old iPhone 16 Pro.