A really nice article by Ben Brooks on the most important benchmark ‘bullet point’ in computing rapidly changing in recent years.

Years back:

Growing up there was really only one bullet point on computers that I cared about: clock speed. I knew that the faster the CPU, the faster the computer. This drove my buying decisions […] for many years

And now:

Battery life is the new benchmark—it’s the first thing that I look at on any new piece of hardware. We can now, finally, make the reasonable assumption that both the hardware and software is fast enough on most devices—so now what matters is portability

I largely agree. I think there will always be people who consider chip-speed, RAM and other technical aspects of a device of paramount importance, but they will continue to diminish in number. However, while computers and mobile are mostly ‘fast enough’ and ‘powerful enough’ for a typical user’s requirements, you can bet most people would bite your arm off if you could double the battery life of their tablet, smartphone or laptop tomorrow.