The problem is the electrical resistance of the socket. Most of the performance on apple silicon is achieved through extremely high bandwidth, low latency memory. Unfortunately that necessitates a socketless design at the moment, and you can see that happening on the snapdragon X too.
My hisense google tv connected to an open wifi network and updated without being told to. The update broke CEC and hdmi arc. I cannot adequately express my rage at this moment.
Admittedly I am in a weird situation where consoles and steam deck are both off the table. I am a bit of a framerate junkie. 30fps is unplayable.
Amusingly my m1 max macbook can actually hold 120fps in final fantasy xiv and actually has a 120hz screen, but those specs for the price would make no sense if this wasn’t also my main productivity system. The battery life, heat, speakers and screen quality are all huge bonuses in this case.
A steam deck would never satisfy me, so a gaming laptop would have been mandatory for travel if not for my macbook.
The bigger point here is that if you need that kind of power, it comes with compromises to battery life, heat, and device longevity.
Apple silicon is just fast enough for most workloads you want on a laptop, and can handle surprisingly heavy video workloads. For anything more, a desktop is a better idea than a laptop anyways.
There’s definitely a niche for desktop replacement class laptops, but that is a niche. Gaming laptops are still king though. You don’t buy a macbook for gaming.
At max usage, an m1 has a hard time overheating. The hardware is really good this time, and the previous overheating was due to insufficient cooling hardware.
Even if apple adds features that run the cpu/gpu/neural cores as hard as possible, overheating is not really on the table the same way it was on x86 macbooks.
Amusingly there are a lot of fetish gear Etsy shops that are still above board, but not much else in my experience.
Yeah, audio and video workloads really need the ram. The base model is fine for content consumption though.