> I think the author is taking general advice and applying it to a niche situation. I don't. how many programs are running in your OS right now? how much CPU

> I think the author is taking general advice and applying it to a niche situation. I don't. how many programs are running in your OS right now? how much CPU do you need to keep those things plus the things you need running in a performant manner? how much CPU would you need if things performed better? the answer is "less" every time. better software performance = less money required for hardware to obtain the responsiveness you require. it's important, and it's important completely independently of how it is framed here. just wait till you've seen software get slower for 30 years. to put it another way, watch hardware get faster and faster and faster for 30 years while you observe software continually consume all of the available headroom until it feels slow again. watch that happen for THREE DECADES and wait for someone to tell you that everything is fine and that someone saying "software is unnecessarily slow" is wrong because they aren't framing their argument how you think it should be framed.