Of course, it's only competitive for short bursts of serious CPU work. The thermal limits do kick in pretty quickly.
(I love my MacBook Air, but it does have its limits.)
I’ve been amazed that while it absolutely uses a ton of battery, so has to be plugged in, my kid is able to play 3D online games with me using my old M1 MacBook Air. Not top of the line stuff (and had to change the resolution to 1440x900), but still. It gets hot, but doesn’t thermal throttle. I had half expected it to start throttling but we played for 3 hours last night with no issues.
What’s surprising is it DOES throttle using Discord with video after an hour or so, unless the battery is already full (I’m guessing it tries to charge which generates a lot of heat). You get way less thermals with a full battery and it using power instead of discharging/charging the battery during heavy usage.
A major part of this story I think is especially important, the last time this sort of thing happened was about a decade ago, when I lost 90 pounds without any medical intervention. At that time I learned to code, fixed up my credit, and went from being front line technical support to junior software engineer. Quite a transformative time in my life.
I think curing my sleep apnea due to substantial weight loss means I sleep better, so I just feel more ready to tackle the things the world throws at me. Weight loss is a skill I had, but it required absolute commitment to avoiding sugary foods, eating right every single day, and as soon as I strayed the weight would creep back up over the course of a year or two.
It makes me think of the huge immeasurable economic costs that are happening in the shadows because of obesity, how many people like me are there other aren’t achieving our full potential because we’re just too tired and have too much brain fog to seize the day?