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“It’s not going to do everything, like CAD or GPU work. “ARM architecture over the past four-to-five years has matured to the point where it can handle higher compute loads,” says Ben Bajarin, a technology analyst at Creative Strategies. Your Mac today performs better than the one you had 10 years ago, but the iPhone 11 is in a whole other world than its ancestors from the same era. Driven by nonstop demand for bigger and better smartphones with multiple cameras, augmented reality, and always-listening assistants, mobile chips have improved by leaps and bounds.
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On the mobile side, however, where virtually all chips are based on technology from ARM Holdings, that compromise is being renegotiated. For PC processors, you can have ultra-portable or ultra-powerful, but usually not both. However, we’re starting to reach the limits of that progress: Attempts to go even slimmer, like the discontinued 12-inch MacBook, tend to compromise on performance, since powerful chips typically need cooling systems and struggle to provide anything close to the “all day” battery life of smartphones.
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If you slide the Osborne’s 25-pound chassis up next to a MacBook Air, you’ll really appreciate how far miniaturization has progressed. The first real portable computer, the Osborne 1, debuted in 1981.
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