if Apple had its way, we would still be stuck with old, slow hardware.
It's a fact that PC gaming pushes hardware innovation that benefits not just gamers but everyone in the tech industry.
Could you elabroate further on that?
My impression of PC gaming hardware is that everything seems to be in pursuit of ever faster performance, often at the expense of higher power consumption and heat generation. Many gaming laptops cannot even sustain their advertised performance without being plugged in to the mains, or their battery is dead in under an hour. And they are all thick and heavy, with equally bulky power bricks.
Maybe there is innovation to be had in all this, but I have not felt it to be meaningful innovation that has directly benefited me as a non-gamer.
The chief reason why Apple moved away from Intel was precisely because Intel was unable to supply the sort of processors that they needed. Even Haswell achieved its long battery life in laptops by severely limiting performance. When we look at what today's M1 Macs are capable of (long battery life, low heat, quiet fan noise, sustained performance even not plugged in to an external power source), it seems to represent the antithesis of everything that the PC market stands for today. It allows for form factors that would otherwise be impractical in windows PCs (see the ultra-thin iMac, which is still my favourite form factor thus far).
I so sometimes wonder if the market will eventually go down the path that Apple has with the M1 chip (eg: everything is integrated on the same chip). It will be interesting to see what that eventually means for the "build your own PC" community, if we ultimately come to the point where the performance disparity of slotting individual parts together on a motherboard is simply too great compared to using an integrated chip directly from a vendor, making it impractical save for fancy Instagram pics.
