Originally posted by polarathene
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So for example, you're targeting a 3 second web page load time on low end hardware through low bandwidth for customer engagement. You trim your website down to 80k of content not counting images and the Javascript is optimized until it runs quickly enough not to ruin user experience on a Moto G phone from 2015.
The bright news is that your content is more efficient than literally 99% of other web content, and 90% of the people with a smart phone in the world can use your site.
The bad news is that smart phones and tablets from 2010 which should be perfectly viable computing devices today still struggle with your content, or can't handle it at all. And spending the extra time to take the site content down from 80k to 40k or less will never pay for itself in increased customer engagement, because the people with devices that need that 40k improvement are by definition the ones with no discretionary money for your products.
So even by being efficient, you're going to cut people at the bottom out. And I'm not angry at you for that, because I understand you can't pay your bills catering to those people. But the result is the same - in 10 years you will be one of the comparatively efficient people, which by then will mean you're targeting smartphones that only have 2GB of RAM and 10 mb/s connection speeds, while the rest of the market assumes 8GB of RAM and 50 mb/s.
Remember, nobody uses an iPhone 1 for anything today. They're an antiquity. And it has more than 200 times the raw speed of the computer that powered the moon landings and more than 50,000 times as much memory. Apple sold millions of that phone and the users loved it. It was good enough for six million people in the first year it was out. Today, just 13 years later, it's good enough for nobody and I'd be surprised if 10 of the 100 most popular sites on the internet work on it at all.
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