NGram

This has sort of been understood for a while, though? It’s down to what you design it for. ARM chips have historically been designed to be small and low power whereas x86 has focused more on high performance. So obviously x86 is playing catch up on power management (for lower power states) but can have good efficiency at higher power. The front-end (the part that decodes instructions) is just a small piece of what makes a modern processor good, and is just about the only thing that is necessarily different between x86 and ARM (and RISC-V too).

I hope the Moscone Center didn’t have to ban all LGBTQ+ and/or 18+ events to get Visa to commit

This is the first time I’ve seen someone suggest PowerTools specifically to waste energy lol

It’s never really been about upfront price so much as longevity. If you can avoid a laptop upgrade e.g. every 5 years by upgrading just a few components instead, it’ll last you longer and cost you less longterm.

Fundamentally, the cheapest way to build electronics is with very little modularity. Making parts swappable is more complicated to design and needs more components to be included. Both drive up the cost of the product.

No sweat if it’s too expensive or that’s not what you care about (ok, though you should sweat not caring about longevity), but making it all about the price is sort of missing the point. Capitalism is a tool for improving our lives but is not the only tool for that.