The thermal overhead of x86 instruction decoding isn’t holding these machines back.

No, but Intel's failed promise to keep total thermal output down in the last 3 generations did.

They failed their TDP and die shrink projections when those machines were designed.

So, Apple would have had to redesign the whole case to match the new reality (which they could, but for their kind of redesigns it takes more time and people were already complaining about the lack of a 32GB option).

But why then did other laptop manufacturers not get affected by the issue?

Others are as well (e.g [1], [2] -- similarly you'll find for Lenovo and others).

It's just that Apple gets preferential negative reporting (who would click on an Asus link?)

Plus, those with clunky "gamer" / "desktop replacement" style cases are not.

(1) https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-Surface-Pro-series-f...

(2) https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/7wqzhg/dell_not_solvi...

Apple has had years to do this. Years to plan for this. This is their product. They are the one putting their brand on it.

Sorry, but they've already demonstrated they had the time to build out a 32GB machine that could do this. They had the time. They just chose to invest it in a touch bar and a thinner design.

They've had the time.

>Sorry, but they've already demonstrated they had the time to build out a 32GB machine that could do this. They had the time.

That's the same 2016 design as the new model. So it definitely doesn't prove that "they had the time" -- and even less that they wasted it in "a touch bar and a thinner design". The touch bar and thinner design came at the time of the Intel promises, and matched OK with the performance seen at the time.

On 2016, when they presented it, Intel was still promising lowered TDP cpus in the pipeline.

> even less that they wasted it in "a touch bar and a thinner design".

Yes. They had the time. They chose to invest it in putting a touch screen on your keyboard.

You got your timeline backwards.

Apple put the "touch screen on your keyboard" when they introduced the current design in 2016.

At the time, and for the next year, 2017, the design was perfectly fine for the then-current Intel CPUs models. And Intel was promising even more efficient models.

It's not like there was a thermal problem in 2016, when Apple introduced the design and they ignored it to concentrate on the touch strip. Not only wasn't there such a problem at 2018, it still wasn't in 2017 either.

One could argue that Apple should have created a new design in the 5-6 previous months during which they had Intels new chips at hand.

But that's a much shorter notice, and something totally different than the inane complain about "focusing on the touch screen on the keyboard" which gets the timeline backwards.

> You got your timeline backwards.

No, I have my timeline correct. You are just ignoring what I'm writing.

> Apple put the "touch screen on your keyboard" when they introduced the current design in 2016.

Yes.

So, prior to 2016, they could have been working on building out a 32GB machine, giving people what they wanted.

But they didn't.

> At the time, and for the next year, 2017, the design was perfectly fine for the then-current Intel CPUs models.

But it wasn't perfectly fine for people they are currently marketing to.

All indicators point to that being the day you will be required to only run apps from the official Apple App Store, unless you pay for a developer cert like for iOS devices.