More bias, and a poor conclusion.

 I read this article on the M1 chip and I couldn't quite escape the parallels to my thoughts on Whitechapel.

What amazed me is that the reviewer spent 99% of the time setting things up to agree with me... and then suddenly veered off the deep end after apparently drinking too much of the Apple Kool-Aid.

I will agree with the title of the article; Apple's strategy is effectively mocking the likes of Intel and AMD. But, Apple can sell a chip this way. It is much more debate-able if a company whose primary revenue is chips can do the same thing. There are also a lot of BAD assumptions and claims that don't actually hold water.

For instance, the article makes the assumption that for Apple to be able to do this, that they MUST have a spectacular chip. It uses a slide .... FROM APPLE MARKETING ... to justify things. A graph which hilariously implies that the M1 just outright slaughters Intel chips. And this is just PAINFULLY wrong.

As per that other link, the M1 is just barely above average. It is beaten, overall by the Ryzen 5 3600. Not a particularly spectacular chip. Now, the single core performance IS pretty darn good. But, this is arguably NOT a high end chip set.

I don't want to lie, it is more than powerful enough for almost any consumer application. It is a fine gaming chip. It is a fine graphics processing chip. It is a superb tablet, browsing or media consuming chip. But it is NOT the top of its game. I would not use this chip for a server for instance. Which in turn means I would favour Intel or AMD for development as well as my dev machines end up serving as pseudo-servers.

It is also not a high end game chip.

The rate of advancement of processors has slowed down. And Apple has taken advantage of this slow down. The performance difference between the M1 and a high end Intel chip is unlikely to matter for most people.

What the reviewer got right is that most people are going to compare the performance of the M1 chips to the chips it replaces. Not many people are going to compare the M1 to other Intel chips.

And positioning the chip across the entire Apple lineup blurs the line and quiets a lot of (admittedly petty) bickering.

For instance, a lot of people would criticize the Apple for choosing underwhelming Intel processors. They did this because anyone could see it was an Intel chip. And they could easily check the Intel catalogue and see just badly Apple cheaped out. But, far fewer people would compare the Intel chips in older Macs to AMD chips or say, Qualcomm.

This is exactly why I argued that it was smart for Google to make their own chips. They were frequently criticized for choosing out dated SoCs or, as they did in the Pixel 5, choosing mid range chips. By choosing a vendor with a known product lineup you can easily point to it and say "BUT I WANTED THAT ONE MOMMY!".

My wife has a Pixel 5 and I have a Pixel 3. Neither of us have any performance issues with our phones. And yet people whine about the Pixel 5 SoC choice. Not because it isn't good enough, but because we KNOW it is a mid-range chip and other phones are getting better ones.

Apple and Google alike only need to do a few things with their own silicon; beat what came before it (which in both cases was middling hardware) and then continue to beat their own hardware. As long as they don't create any controversial decisions to create a mid-range chip and put it in a high end device they are safe.