M4 MacBook Air teardown reveals it's just as easy to repair as its predecessor

Well, I'd argue that the performance leaps Apple is seeing with the M4 in particular but each prior generation of the M-series is kind of a continuing "surprise," in that one keeps wondering how much more double-digit increases in various scores are going to keep happening across this decade.

Apple's emphasis on energy management and cooling systems makes it the CLEAR winner across the entire industry when it comes to notebooks and their battery life. Intel and AMD just can't come close on these fronts.

chasm said:

Hard to imagine what the NEXT five years will bring us. If you'd told me that Apple would someday be the innovation leader in the chip industry a few years back, I'd have laughed.

Well then your understanding of the semiconductor industry is limited or you have been wearing blinders all this time.

Apple shocked the entire industry back in 2013 when it released the A7 SoC, the first 64-bit processor widely deployed in a mobile device, the iPhone 5s. It was a mic drop moment for anyone following semiconductors. The rest of the industry was stunned into silence.

That was five years after Apple had acquired P.A. Semi (for $278 million back in 2008). It was clear to industry observers that the acquisition would take years before it showed any impact. 

A handful of people speculated back then that Apple's chip efforts would eventually lead to notebook and desktop computing. When Apple announced Apple Silicon in the form of the M1 SoC, it was pretty much a fait accompli. They had already moved to in-house graphics architecture and included machine learning transistors (the Neural Engine debuted in 2017).

When I look at the M4 family, I think "well, duh, they have been doing this for a looooong time. A good iterative improvement."

Apple now has five and ten year milestones since the P.A. Semi acquisition. For sure there is a roadmap somewhere in Apple that has milestone goals for 15 and 20 years after the P.A. Semi deal.

And it is wrong to focus on just the CPU or fixate on Macs.

We are seeing innovative silicon elsewhere from Apple. The S-series silicon in Apple Watch (now in its tenth generation), the H-series silicon in AirPods (two generations) and now the recently revealed C1 modem chip. There's a U-series chip in the AirPods Pro charging case, who knows what the next version will do? And at some point Apple is going to put a smarter chip in a future version of the AirTag.