Your math looks right. I think we just take for granted how much energy we use to do basic things these days. If you do a similar calculation for a full tank of gasoline it's pretty surprising.
The battery in my MacBook Air already has close the energy of that grenade and an iPhone Plus is more than a quarter of that. Then while I am sure there are other benefits to this solid state battery, modern Li-ion are already in the range of 500 Whr/L.
There was another thread around here comparing an iPhone to a Cray-1 supercomputer. What's interesting was that back in the 90s they finally had the power to compute and visualize live simulations of things like galaxy formation or fluid dynamics straight from a supercomputer (e.g. a several generations newer Cray Y-MP if I remember). An A9 or A10 is comparable to those computers and yet now that's barely enough power to browse the web.
I think we need to ask ourselves, should running this OS or rendering a typical web page require more than a supercomputer of power?
I think people will look back at this era of computing the same way we do as whaling for oil or dumping chemicals into the infinity of the ocean. Apple Silicon while better than Intel's chips, especially the older ones, still use a fair amount of energy and the tech stack on top of them is going in the wrong direction.
Yeah, the new TDK tech is 100 times denser than their last gen solid state battery but only about twice as dense as lithium polymer. We're not going to be charging once a year with this.
The Cray Y-MP had about 2.7 GFLOPS, the A8 had 136 GFLOPS in the GPU alone. It's hard to find Geekbench results for a Cray, and FLOPS are sort of out of fashion for CPUs metrics but there's two cores running 1.5GHz each.
I'm not finding a power spec on the Y-MP, but the Cray 1 in that video drew 115kW. That's about a grenade worth of energy every two seconds or so. A grenade powers my phone, including radios and display, for hours.
The A8 or A9 may have a supercomputer worth of computation, but not a supercomputer worth of power-- not by a long shot.
While the Y-MP might have modeled galaxy formation at a coarse level, but we were viewing the web 30 years ago too. Both capabilities have advanced. And we’ve made the decision that, rather than spending inordinate amounts of time getting every last cycle out of insanely fast processors, we'll sacrifice some computational efficiency for more rapid development.
I dunno, I just can't find a reason to be as cynical as you are on it.
I should also mention that the hand grenade comparison first came to my attention
here:
