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Comment by bottlepalm | Hacker News Reader

MacBook Neo has in a way unified the platforms. The only difference is essentially what OS is booted up with the chip.

That’s the difference though. Put macOS on a phone chip and it’s now a “real computer,” just a smaller one.

The M chips are mostly just roided out A chips: higher clocks, better cooling, more P cores, big GPU, and I think deeper pipelines and more cache. The ALU and many other sections are, I think, identical.

Thermal throttling is actually a non trivial limit on phones. Put a heat sink and a fan on an A chip and sustained compute is faster.

The OS and its restrictiveness determines the class of device not the hardware.

That was already the case with the M-series chips, which are shared between Macs and higher-end iPads. The Neo just extends it to the A-series as well.

Yep I know, and now using a last gen A chip, I feel they are really rubbing our faces in it.

Like Apple is saying, "Nice iPhone 17 Pro w/ A19 w/ vapor cooling chip you have there; you know you run a full general purpose OS on it, but we're not gonna let you, nanananana :p"

No exactly, Apple is playing in our faces, all while people continue to defend the “differences” of device categories and the subsequent justification of shipping iPhones and iPads with locked bootloaders.

Unless you work for Apple or hold significant stock then I don’t see the logic in defending this choice to hamstring the iPhone.

But even as an investor, I think Apple could bring a lot of people/money to the Mac ecosystem by getting them in with an iPhone lapdock.

The belief that people only hold opposing opinions to yours because they have money on the line is such conspiracy theory nonsense. Some random teenage in middle America couldn't just really like Apple products? It's gotta be some grand conspiracy against you?

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