That’s the difference though. Put macOS on a phone chip and it’s now a “real computer,” just a smaller one.
The M chips are mostly just roided out A chips: higher clocks, better cooling, more P cores, big GPU, and I think deeper pipelines and more cache. The ALU and many other sections are, I think, identical.
Thermal throttling is actually a non trivial limit on phones. Put a heat sink and a fan on an A chip and sustained compute is faster.
The OS and its restrictiveness determines the class of device not the hardware.
