Your next Mac will have a faster processor, snappier graphics, and better communication skills, right? And your next iPhone, iPad, and iWhatever will be similarly juiced, eh? Well, yeah--but don’t count on those improvements to continue forever, unless there’s a significant breakthrough in chip-making technology.

If you’re not getting enough battery life out of your smartphone, don’t just blame the manufacturer. There’s more to how long a phone can operate than how big its battery is or how much time you spend streaming video or playing Tiny Wings--there’s the handset’s guts, services provided by your wireless carrier, and your phone’s software.

Is the Mac doomed? Maybe so.

Case in point: although the Mac’s market share is rising worldwide -- thanks in no small part to the halo effect of iOS devices -- desktop Macs contributed only $6.4 billion to Apple’s 2011 net sales of $108.2 billion. (Apple’s fiscal year wraps up at the end of September.) Savvy readers will have noticed that the $6.4 billion I cited was for desktop Macs only. MacBooks brought in over $15 billion, with sales up 36 percent over the previous year. While that may sound impressive, the new kid on the block, the iPad, bested all shapes and sizes of MacBooks taken together, earning $20 billion during the year. That’s impressive.

An AMD-led team has set a new Guinness World Record for the “Highest Frequency of a Computer Processor” by cranking up a soon-to-be-released chip to 8.429GHz. Pause for a nanosecond to let that number sink in: that’s eight billion, four hundred twenty-nine million cycles per second.

What is it about guys? Give them something fast and their immediate impulse is to make it faster.