Spot on. Exactly this. It’s like pre-iPhone when people just assumed you had a laptop and a cellphone. Then Apple said “phone computer!” and changed the game. Same with iPad just less innovation shock. Meanwhile we continued to have this delineation of computer / phone while under the hood - to a hardware engineer - it’s all the same. Naturally the chips they produced for iOS-land are beasts. My phone is faster than the computer I had 5 years ago. My M1 air is just a freak of nature. On par with high end machines but passively cooled and cheaper. I’m still kinda in awe. Not a big fan of the hush hush on Apple Silicon causing us all to play catch-up for support, but that’s Apple’s track record I guess.

The M1 is all the things they learned from the A1-A12 chips (or whatever the ordering) which is over a decade of tweaking the design for efficiency (phone) while giving it power (iPad).