Don't forget to add that Apple is now doing this on their version of a "budget" laptop that has no active cooling, that gets 18-20 hours of battery life, that runs emulated x86 code with almost no performance hit and is a 1st gen product.
I don't think any of these details can be understated. Even AMD's 1st gen Ryzen kind of sucked and look where that is now.
> Don't forget to add that Apple is now doing this on their version of a "budget" laptop that has no active cooling
The Anandtech tests were on an actively-cooled Mac Mini and the power draw numbers they were observing were far outside of what can be passively cooled in a laptop. You'd need to wait for Air-specific results before drawing too many conclusions on how it performs.
AnandTech isn't the only one providing benchmarks, they are rolling in from all over the place now. People are running 15 minute finale cut pro jobs and the fan isn't kick in on the macbook pro.
At this price it's more expensive than 80% of best-selling laptops, so not quite budget. If you compare in price to Dell for example, they only compete with their XPS line, which is their high-end one.
Apple only does high-end products, which is fine but doesn't make that model cheap.
I know this gets repeated often, but this is simply not true. Apple _does_ make high-end products, and they market themselves as a high-end brand, but Apple has always filled as many market segments as they can. There are plenty examples that prove this statement wrong: iPod Shuffle, iPhone SE, the $250 iPad. They never do deep discounts on their products though, so when they age or go stale they are far overpriced; and they do _not_ make value or budget models.
To look at these CPUs a different way, it’s fairly competitive with Ryzen processors that cost $600-700 alone, except that will buy the whole Mac Mini.
When I say first gen product, I mean the whole product, not just the chip used. It would be a very different situation if we were talking about an upgraded iPad with a new chip. This is a platform defining moment.
And architectural similarities between their first 14nm chip and their last 10nm chips are as m1 is similar to a12z at least, may be even their first 64bit
I don't think any of these details can be understated. Even AMD's 1st gen Ryzen kind of sucked and look where that is now.