One reason for more memory is we have largely given up on the dll dream in favour of container level abstractions (which includes the way desktop apps are going

One reason for more memory is we have largely given up on the dll dream in favour of container level abstractions (which includes the way desktop apps are going). The idea of using the operating system to paint UI widgets is positively quaint, at least on the desktop. We are also 64 bit now. Every pointer in every app is twice as wide as twenty years ago, and we love pointers, especially in higher level languages. The CPU usage is a lot more mysterious. We do casually do things like audio and video decoding which previously used to use a lot of CPU, and where they are not offloaded to DSPs today they can be offloaded to inevitably underused spare cores. GPUs and associated acceleration are widespread enough that the pixel hit is felt mainly on the GPU. Hitting CPU limits tends to be the result of using arbitrarily complex pointer laden data structures to represent ideas such as what passes for CSS and the DOM. Those are not what you would invent if you cared for performance, which is a major factor in why mobile native UIs feel so much faster.