> Which software exactly is functionally the same yet consumes more resources? This is irrelevant, as it's extremely difficult to find any two pieces of softwa

> Which software exactly is functionally the same yet consumes more resources? This is irrelevant, as it's extremely difficult to find any two pieces of software that are "functionally the same", regardless of their age of release or performance - and, moreover, because we're programmers, we can make informed estimates about the minimum performance impact of most features without just guessing. For instance, string localization should have no perceptible performance impact - it's literally just a key-value lookup (O(1) with a hash table). The additional features that Spotify provides over Audacious (a local Linux music player) are either not intrinsically computationally expensive (fetching audio over a network) or are done server-side (playlist recommendation). Discord has no technically valid reason to be taking up 15% of a CPU core while sitting in the background. And so on. > Today 4K is normal, and combined with refresh rates and colors, we’re pushing upwards of 2 orders of magnitude more data to our screens. We have GPUs that now do all of our graphics rendering work for us. The features implemented by Spotify, Slack, Discord, and Visual Studio Code do not intrinsically require enough graphical resources that they should stress even an older integrated GPU, let alone take 5 seconds to start up on CPU and RAM that are, similarly, one to two decimal orders of magnitude faster than what we had two decades ago. > YouTube and Netflix didn’t exist 20 years ago. Browsers were incredibly slow and couldn’t support streaming video or anything but the smallest of applications written in JavaScript. Localization didn’t exist, web analytics wasn’t really a thing, browsers didn’t run background tasks. None of this is relevant to applications. Browsers were slow back then? Fine. Browsers are faster now? Also fine. That's still irrelevant to the fact that many applications are slower now, on much faster hardware, than they were then.