The article talks about three technologies, and IMHO none is about putting processes to background. The first one is about compressing pages instead of swapping them to secondary storage. This should be a net gain in almost all scenarios. The second - App Nap - only applies to GUI applications, and there are opt-out controls. The third - Timer Coalescing - is the only one that has the potential to alter application behavior, and it only kicks in when the machines runs on battery.