[copascetic]

> Morehead's allegiances and work are relevant biases, as are Gruber's. But Morehead's review wasn't of the M1 processor or architecture as a technology. It was a review of the 13" M1 MacBook Pro as an end-user device.

Moorhead's review literally contains this sentence:

> The new M1 processor is impressive, but far from perfect- it has many warts, that nearly nobody is discussing.

He then proceeds to describe not warts of the M1 as a processor, but rather warts of the 3rd party software ecosystem. I think overall the review is fine and not in bad faith, but it's easy to see how people are latching on to that sentence. If he were honest about making it a review about the overall product experience, rather than the silicon, he wouldn't need to write that sentence.

[chii]

> rather warts of the 3rd party software ecosystem.

which is the result of the change in processor. There is, of course, an undertone of bias in the review against the M1.

It's like someone reviewing a tesla car and complain that it's difficult to charge because there's not enough chargers in the road networks and gas stations don't cater for electric vehicles. A valid complaint about the tesla car, but not caused directly by the quality/capability of the car itself.

[Pet_Ant]

Yeah, the question is always for whom is this review? For my mom that distinction is irrelevant and can be ignored. For myself, it's crucial. I hate seeing CPU benchmarks where they don't compile the compiler for that u-arch first then the run it on Firefox, and then test the resulting because that tells you the actually capabilities of the chip not just how it performs for existing binaries that will be updated within 6 months most likely.

[copascetic]

Yes, and if you wrote such a review, and many have I'm sure, you wouldn't say that the electric drivetrain itself "has warts".

[totalZero]

A reviewer cannot in good faith separate M1 silicon from its end-user product experience, because it is not a standalone product. M1 is not available off the shelf. It is only available in a couple of small laptops and the Mac Mini.

[copascetic]

It's easy to rewrite that sentence to make that separation clear, and he doesn't. Gruber goes into detail about the author's history of being wrong and misleading in the past regarding Apple's processors, so in that context I think it's fair to take that part of the review in bad faith.

[totalZero]

Morehead isn't asking us to take his word for it. He used the device for a few days and shared his review as a counterpoint explicitly intended to balance against the pro-M1 hype. I thought it was a pretty nice assessment because Morehead focused on product usability instead of raw benchmarks, and I used his review as part of the process of informing my recent decision to buy an Intel MBP13 rather than an M1 model.

It seems obvious that Morehead's opinion seven years ago about 64bit being unnecessary in mobile was incorrect, mainly because today's mainstream phones ship with more RAM than 32bit would support, but that doesn't mean every word Morehead types is now ritually unclean. He was wrong about something; it hurts his credibility but doesn't banish him from the conversation.

Besides, unless we think Morehead doctored his screenshots, it's pretty hard to argue that his review is nonfactual in its entirety.

More specifically to your point, I don't see why there has to be a separation between hardware quality and software experience when the user (A) can't buy the hardware without paying for the OS too, and (B) can't use the hardware without using the OS too.

[copascetic]

If you just bought a new Intel MBP then you got a horrible deal by comparison. I also didn't say the review was nonfactual, just that it contains within it an inaccurate framing and conflation of M1 as a processor and the overall product. It's worth noting though that many others' experiences with it, and Rosetta 2 specifically, were quite different than Moorhead's, so unless you're using the specific set of software Moorhead mentioned in his review, it's very possible you would have been better served by an M1, even today.

[ChrisLTD]

They got a horrible deal unless they need more than 16 GB of RAM, more than two USB-C ports, Docker support, dual-boot with Windows, etc.