Apart from that, I think you might me in a minority if you want a loud, hot iPad with a heavy battery to power all of this (for a short time, because physics). There are plenty of Windows devices that work exactly like that though if that's really what makes you happy. Just don't expect great performance either, because of diminishing returns of using higher power and also because the chips in these devices usually suck.
Pure compute power has never been Apple's center of gravity when selling products. The Mac Pro and the XServe are/were minuscule portions of Apple's sales, and the latter product was killed after a short while.
> Apple's engineers have unilaterally decided to handicap their own processors for no real good reason
This is a misunderstanding of what the limiting factor is of Apple products' capability. The mobile devices all have battery as the limfac. The processors being energy efficient in compute-per-watt isn't a handicap, it's an enabler. And it's a very good reason.
I agree with you. I don’t want fans to be quiet, I want them completely gone. And with battery life too, not 30 minutes, but 300 minutes. Modern chips are plenty fast, developers need to optimize their shit instead of churning crapware.
Paradoxically this effect is the worst in ultraportables, where the norm is to cram in CPUs that run too hot for the chassis with tiny batteries, making them weirdly bad at the one thing they’re supposed to be good at. Portability isn’t just physical size and weight, but also runtime and if one needs to bring cables and chargers.
On that note, Apple really needs to resurrect the 12” MacBook with an M-series or even A-series SoC. There’d be absolutely nothing remotely comparable in the x86 ultraportable market.