How come none of the 13/15/17" laptop PC motherboards and internals look like one of a MacBook Pro then?
Reference designs allow precisely that: do the heavy "from-scratch" work and allow manufacturers to bend the reference to fit their constraints.
Also, didn't Apple get Intel to produce a small package, low-voltage processor just for the Air?
It's more probably the usual ULV variant that has existed for every Intel chip since they cared about wattage. I suppose it's more a case of the usual Apple strategy of upfront ordering bucketloads of components, essentially locking the production to themselves.
The original Air had a normal Intel ULV processor in a smaller-than-usual package. Whether this was something Intel came up with and shopped around or something that Apple requested isn’t known.
Reference designs allow precisely that: do the heavy "from-scratch" work and allow manufacturers to bend the reference to fit their constraints.
Also, didn't Apple get Intel to produce a small package, low-voltage processor just for the Air?
It's more probably the usual ULV variant that has existed for every Intel chip since they cared about wattage. I suppose it's more a case of the usual Apple strategy of upfront ordering bucketloads of components, essentially locking the production to themselves.