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One of the benefits touted by the linked article is the forced offline aspect. The other is the much more restricted scope of apps, which keeps the user focused

One of the benefits touted by the linked article is the forced offline aspect. The other is the much more restricted scope of apps, which keeps the user focused. These are technically achievable with an iPad or Pixelbook, but require effort and discipline on the part of the user and on some level directly contradict the design and intended use of both products. I think there are still significant savings to be had in terms of power usage/battery life. Lower power hardware puts a hard cap on how much any one application can consume and incentivizes efficiency on the part of the developer. The device's screen panel can also be selected for efficiency over density, brightness, color gamut, etc since those aren't priorities.

edude03 6y ago
Arguably, these goals in terms of battery life / efficiency are already heavily incentivized for mobile developers - and by extension the iPad despite having "high end" processors. For mobile devices, generally, the strategy is hurry back to sleep, IE ramp up the CPU to do a job quickly then put the processor back in the lowest power state, and for many applications this works great. For the remaining applications, say mobile games, we might be limited more by the users desires (the best graphics, the lowest latency, the best colors, the most immersive sound) rather than this sort of hardware not being available. All this to say, I agree with you that such a device could still exist, I'm just saying we might be that far from it.