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Kickaha
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
 
2021-01-19, 19:49

Dunno, every significant advance Apple has made to push the industry forward has been because they 'went too far'. It's how you FORCE innovation, instead of just enabling it. Even missteps and mistakes push the edge further in those cases.

Super-goddamned thin is what really drove thermal profile innovation, instead of "meh, throw a bigger heat sink on it, it'll be fine". That in turn drove energy use, because seriously, who the hell cares how much power their PC is drawing? Meh, you plug it in, it works, right? That in turn drove efficiency concerns, etc, etc, and holy crap suddenly that laptop that seems way too freaking thin has driven the whole industry in a direction that benefits us all in ways that may not be immediately obvious.

Without 'too thin', I don't believe we'd have the M1. Or the iPhone, they wouldn't have had the experience to pull that off. Or, or, or. It's not just a design-of-form issue, it pushes the technology to accommodate, driving the functionality.

Let's face it, they've been focusing 'inwards' for so long, extracting every erg of efficiency out of the designs in a push to deal with Intel's *in*efficiencies, that now that they have a new baseline for computation/W in the M1, the sky is the freaking limit.

What does an M3 in a desktop unit that doesn't care *quite* so much about battery life perform like? I mean, jeez, what we're seeing in the M1 is crazy, and a year-over-year leap like we haven't had since the mid '00s, if not the mid '90s.

Look back at the A* CPU progression of the past decade, extrapolate out, soften the power constraints, and holy *crap*.

All because they went 'too thin'.

I'll take it.
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