the iPhone processors have plateau'd and now they can only push camera improvements. that won't work with the computers.
Yeah, and 640K is more memory than anyone will ever need.
...and 40 year-old memes will last forever. Just wait a few months for the M1X to come out and we'll be arguing about whether anybody needs more than 64,000,000K (...if we're lucky and M1X doesn't max out at 32GB).
If you compare the decade that took us from the Apple II (1977) to the Macintosh II (1987) (or even the Mac SE if you think the Mac II is too high-end) with the decade that started with the 2011 MacBook Pro and ended with the 2021 MacBook Pro.... well, the clue is in the names, we're talking evolutionary vs. revolutionary.
...but you also have to look at need - and there we're into diminishing returns. In the mid 80s, someone handed me a 5.25" floppy which, after chunking away for about a minute while it filled the entire RAM of my 6502 BBC Micro, proceeded to display a grainy smudge that was just about recognisable as a 5-second clip from
Star Wars rendered in 160x256, 7-colour graphics. By the late 80s, Mac II-era computers could play and edit postage-stamp sized 128x128 Quicktime movies of a reasonable length - maybe good enough to use to build an off-line edit decision list or a multimedia product where
any video was a novelty. Then by the mid/late-90s you could actually do realistic non-linear video editing at "better than VHS" (faint praise!) quality on "prosumer" PC equipment and end up with reasonable quality "home videos" that looked fairly good on a full-size TV. So, really, video editing on affordable personal computers went from "can't do" (but with tantalising hints of the future) to "can do" in the space of a decade. ~2010 and a half-decent personal computer could edit 1080p. ~2020 and... make that 4k, and you can probably shoot that on your phone. Sure, big jump in bandwidth, (probably mainly down to hardware codecs in the GPU rather than raw CPU) but, heck, half of what I watch on TV isn't even 1080p yet and its not worth getting 4k on anything less than a 50" screen...
Hence diminishing need - At some point in the last 15 years we shot through "good enough for most people". Being able to shoot and edit even HD video on a phone and edit it on an entry-level Mac opens up huge new possibilities. Being able to do
8k video... can wait for most. Heck - priorities - I'd strongly recommend getting a proper HD camera with proper lenses and support for proper microphones, proper tripods, proper lighting first. I mean, it would be
nice not to have to use HD proxies for 8K editing, but, oh, the humanity...
I'm not saying that nobody needs more power - but it's now about shaving 20% off the time to do your job whereas, in the past, it has been about opening up previously unthinkable possibilities.
I'm just using video as an example - the iPhone
long passed "good enough" for a pocket phone/email/web/media player which is
why Apple are pushing its photography/video capabilities and ability to morph your head into a talking poo emoji.
Nobody seems to have come up with the killer consumer application for super-fast phone/PC processors yet. The big advance of the last decade or so has been in internet access, web apps and social media - which are more about networking infrastructure - and cutting size/weight/power consumption (...and we now have featherlight machines that can run all day on a charge and phones too thin to contain a camera lens...) - the next iPod or iPhone, or new paradigm to displace the UI has yet to emerge. Apart from web stuff, we're mostly running - albeit greatly improved - of the WP/DTP, graphics, spreadsheet, video editing, audio production, coding etc. software that a time traveller from the early 90s would still recognise.
Hell, we haven’t even seen anything but the 15W consumer-grade base-level Mac silicon yet!
True. The problem is that the pro-level Mac silicon is looking a bit overdue, which is concerning. The 15W "MacBook Air" chip was the low-hanging fruit for the switch to ARM. We're all eager to see how well the key features of the M1 - like integrated graphics and on-package unified RAM - can scale to fit the MBP/5k iMac- replacements, which isn't completely obvious.