We're messaging each other right now inside a heavily sandboxed virtual environment that interprets XML-like markup and runs a text-based JITted scripting language from the 90s. It doesn't really matter that it's extremely inefficient, since it's still effectively instant.
Effectively instant means nothing, since everything is fast for small n. I love to give this example from a codebase I have worked on during my Ph.D. The problem which took half an hour under Matlab was done in ~40 seconds with mine, however, a thousand-step version of the same problem would take 11 hours. Saving a single second from that 40 second loop would shave my work by ~20 minutes, and this will compound for bigger problems still.
Just because we see the results instantly, doesn't mean it's fast or efficient by any means. It means we might forego optimizing it for sufficiently small n, if we don't care about that part of the code. That's all.
The app is less efficient only in an abstract, impractical way.
It depends on the calculator and task at hand. Consider graphing, integration or any programmable needs, and they might converge. ALU of a processor is pretty efficient at what it does.
> The app is less efficient only in an abstract, impractical way.
Again, depends, as I said above. You tend to brush efficiency away because you only mentally measure time to completion, only, which is understandable.
If it's not, then it's not.