Not all uses of extra resources are bad. A “good” use of CPU or memory is any added safety such as guards against memory corruption, extra checks at run time,

Not all uses of extra resources are bad. A “good” use of CPU or memory is any added safety such as guards against memory corruption, extra checks at run time, cryptography, etc. It may also be that in order to add sanity to web browsing, E-mail, etc. you must devote cycles to spam detection or removal of other unwanted content. Some of these things are only being done now because computers are finally good enough. Unfortunately, there are plenty of wasteful examples too. One seems to be pure laziness. There are programs, I’m convinced, that have some kind of gigantic VM in them just to ease porting efforts; probably emulating half a damned operating system just to save somebody a few weeks of coding (heaven forbid they learn something new about each target OS instead of just trying to make a quick buck). It’s disgusting on the desktop but even worse on mobile where every short-cut by a developer literally cost users money in data, battery life, etc.