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Once a laptop can run email/web/word/excel smoothly, which I think is like 90% pc use, on a whole day battery. I think we don’t need more speed

Thats not how it works, software is a gas that expands to fill all the available performance space until it all slows down and we need better hardware again.

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But suppose some nation decided that they could devote more software development resources to designing efficient software, and that they could limit processing intensive applications (like online gaming?).

Conceivably they could run the economically important IT functions of the country using less powerful, easier to manufacture, less power hungry greener, and readily available semiconductors.

This sounds a bit like Wirth's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

I’ve always wondered - would the effort to develop such software be lower, because the hardware is more forgiving.

In which case you are trading human (software development) time for hardware resources.

If that were the case, it seems like an okay-ish trade off to me tbh.

Brain time > CPU time

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