So an M1 MacBook air basically?

“Basically” is doing a lot of work there. Those two things don’t have the same parts in them, just the same kinds of parts.

It’s not a categorical point but current iPhones don’t even have real external display support.

iPhones have had external display support for a _long_ time. Does it require an adapter? Sure. The USB-C only MacBooks and iPads do too, unless you have a USB-C display. It’s entirely possible to display different content on the internal display and external display. That’s an app specific feature in iOS, but not a hardware limitation.

Have you seen a current iMac motherboard? Nearly all of the I/O is on a breakout board with a thunderbolt controller. Does an iPhone expose PCI-E lanes for interconnect? No, of course not, but there were desktops long before PCI-E and as others have mentioned, the first USB-C MacBook had exactly the same number of external ports as the iPhone.

> iPhones have had external display support for a _long_ time. Does it require an adapter? Sure.

And it’s actually a compressed video output reusing the screen recording hardware. The adapter runs a miniature iOS that decompresses the video again. It’s not raw pixels.