Some of those more-obscure operating systems simply felt like magic. Refresh a webpage on Windows or Linux, mp3 you're playing pops and skips about half the time. Mouse just seemingly-randomly becomes unresponsive. BeOS on the same machine? Hard to load the system enough that playback isn't smooth, and input was only rarely anything other than instant-feeling. Closest I've seen to that recently is iOS, but it cheats by suspending or evicting backgrounded programs.
... but, point is, a chat app ought to be able to run smoothly using perhaps 10% of a single efficiency-core on an M1, when actively being used, and about 0% when inactive. These programs acting like they're mining Bitcoin just to let you chat, which we used to do on hardware far weaker than many modern thermostats have (hell, maybe even some lightbulbs), are absolute jokes.
> Refresh a webpage on Windows or Linux, mp3 you're playing pops and skips about half the time.
Not my experience. Windows (and IIRC MacOS too) always had a great disk I/O scheduler that prioritized audio related tasks so I never had mp3s pop or skip on me, no matter how hard I was thrashing my spinning rust disks back then.
Linux was the one where I noticed this issue intensely back then as the schedulers used by mainstream distros were all tuned for server/mainframe workloads.
To be fair to Windows, it didn't take much more powerful hardware before that problem went away—the mp3 stuttering, anyway, UI lag/unresponsiveness is still struggling to match BeOS on ~every major OS, today. Was all Win98 for me in that era, maybe XP and such improved it (I don't think I ever tried to run it on anything that weak)
... but, point is, a chat app ought to be able to run smoothly using perhaps 10% of a single efficiency-core on an M1, when actively being used, and about 0% when inactive. These programs acting like they're mining Bitcoin just to let you chat, which we used to do on hardware far weaker than many modern thermostats have (hell, maybe even some lightbulbs), are absolute jokes.