The (very good) writeup conveys this much better than I could, but briefly for folks not inclined to click/read through: it’s a design trade off. Apple’s soluti

The (very good) writeup conveys this much better than I could, but briefly for folks not inclined to click/read through: it’s a design trade off. Apple’s solution conditionally sends excess power to the speakers—higher power to achieve better sound under safe conditions, lower power to protect the speakers from damage. It’s quite clever (and quite effective, although I’m sure some audiophiles would disagree), but it’s not the kind of design you’d want to use without an equivalent solution. It’s also an unintuitive benefit of having a whole lot of compute headroom to play with, where you can create an intentional footgun that has meaningful benefits but risks physical consequences, and then spend some of that headroom to disarm the gun. A pure software analogy (because that’s what I know better) would be something like: race a bunch of speculative variant algorithms in parallel, knowing that you’re “wasting” compute time, where the probability of speculation being more optimal than hand tuning is high and pathological cases have a “safe” straightforward deoptimization.