Yes, but you only really encounter that when pushing the CPU to 100% for more than a few minutes. The cooling is objectively terrible, but still easily enough for most users, that's the crazy thing.
maybe? as local LLM/SD etc get more common it might be common to push it. I've been getting my fans to come on and get burning hot quite often lately because of new tech. I get that I'm a geek but with Apple, Google and everyone else trying to run local ML it's only a matter of time.
After posting this I thought of a few possible use cases. They might never come to pass but ... Some tech similar to DLSS might come along that lets streaming services like youtube and netflix to send 1/10th the data and get twice as good an image but require extreme processing on the client. It would certainly be in their interest (less storage, less bandwidth, decompression-upscaling costs pushed to client) Whether that will ever happen I have no idea. I was just trying to think of an example of something that might need lots of compute power at home for the masses.
Another could be realtime video modification. People like to stream and facetime. They might like it even more if they could change their appearance more than they already can using realtime ML based image processing. We already have some of that in the various video conferencing / facetime apps but it's possible it could jump up in usage and needed compute power with the right application.
Apple's chips already have AI accelerators for things like content-based image search. They would never retroactively worsen battery life and performance just for a few more AI features when they could instead use it as selling point for the next hardware generation.
And if you regularly use local generative AI models the Pro model is the more reasonable choice. At that point you can forget battery life either way.
No, I'm saying if you have 640k you can't just download more RAM, and Apple wouldn't ever try to because that's a free new feature they can market in the next model.
