Thanks for reading and adding your thoughts, Ryan.

Back around the time when the iPad was launched, there was a lot of talk and assumptions about RISC chips being inherently more power efficient than x86 chips. But since then, I’ve seen numerous articles and comments from engineers saying that’s a myth and that x86 chips could, theoretically, be just as efficient as ARM’s RISC chips.

So, I’m now of the opinion that it’s the licensing model that really makes the difference. Apple and Qualcomm take the ARM design and then add in their own expertise to make it much better. You can’t do that with an Intel chip.

Apple doesn’t want to be using and marketing the same Intel processors that competitors use. It wants to brand its Macs as special — as having processors than no-one else has access to.

And given the incredible rate at which their processors have improved over the last 10 years — CPU and GPU — I think it’s likely that Apple will soon be offering laptops with power/efficiency combinations that no-one else will be able to match.