[Perceval]

Most of what Apple sells goes into mobile devices: phone, tablet, laptop. In their prior incarnation, they ran up real hard against the thermal limits of what they could put in their laptops with the IBM PowerPC G5 chip.

Pure compute power has never been Apple's center of gravity when selling products. The Mac Pro and the XServe are/were minuscule portions of Apple's sales, and the latter product was killed after a short while.

> Apple's engineers have unilaterally decided to handicap their own processors for no real good reason

This is a misunderstanding of what the limiting factor is of Apple products' capability. The mobile devices all have battery as the limfac. The processors being energy efficient in compute-per-watt isn't a handicap, it's an enabler. And it's a very good reason.