Yes I realise that. My point was that Intel was late to the low power game. For example, in the embedded systems that I have worked on in the last 8 years, PowerPC (and later FreeScale) or other options (including Sparc) were always the better options when power considerations were paramount. The advantage of Intel/x86 was (and is) cost and GNU/Linux and BSD support.
To quote your own repost from AnandTech:
> […] Intel has admitted that it has been slow to
> respond to the low-power trends and has redoubled its efforts to lower
> the power requirements of its future CPUs.
Onwards:
> Atom is
> what made lightweight netbooks possible in the first place.
Netbooks perhaps, but we are talking about lightweight laptops.
Regarding innovation in the space, I think Jobs/Apple made it fairly explicit in the last few years that such details, as Doug notes, are not of relevance to users except in how it, Apple, can leverage them to cater to the things that matter to users (lightweight, durability, power) - specs on which Apple has done pretty well among laptops, even at a time when their iBooks and PowerBooks were running on PowerPC.
—ravi