Core design: Why the iPad Pro can be faster than your Mac

To the average

smartphone

user, the single-core performance is the most important of the two. Since it is quite hard to create programs that can benefit from multiple cores running together, most everyday apps will only really run in a single-core way.

A proposed edit. It's true for all consumer workloads. My definition of a consumer workload, the average user, is web browsing, office automation and 2D gaming. With 3D gaming, a nice GPU and maybe 3 to 4 p-cores. Even the content creators don't need that many p-cores, or GPUs, or "a lot" of RAM. 32 GB to 64 GB of RAM is not a lot.

If Apple made a Mac with an A16 or A17 SoC, it would make for a nice PC that 90% of the market could use comfortably. The big thing is it has to have 8 GB of RAM and 1 GByte/s of r+w storage. 16 GB RAM would put it in the higher end of office automation and white collar work.

Apple is not in the business of selling $600 laptops, yet, but it's a move they can make. The iPad Air 2 with M2, 8 GB RAM, 128 GB storage is almost all the way there, except 11" displays are too small for modern PC workflows. They could trade the M2 for an A16 and use that money for a 13" display. An A16 with 8 GB, 128 GB storage and 13" display at $600 is a nice laptop for most consumers on the market.