[itsokimbatman]

I don’t think “impressive iteration” begins to describe it. I am very rarely impressed by new tech these days, and the M1 is the first piece of new hardware I’ve seen in years that seems downright magical.

My previous laptop was a 2016 MBP with an i7, and the M1 destroys it. I can build large projects like LLVM or WebKit fast and it doesn’t even get hot.

I’ve also been running Linux VMs with the new Parallels and they feel native speed.

Rosetta 2 is incredible, Intel apps are very responsive on M1.

My work computer is a high end 16” 2019 MBP with 64 GB of RAM and honestly if it weren’t for needing the extra RAM or the occasional x86 VM I’d trade it in for an M1 in a heartbeat.

I’ll agree the Apple hype is unrealistic at times, but the M1 is one that absolutely deserves it.

[Blumfid]

It's not a helpful comparison if you compare a chip from 2016 with a chip from 2020.

You would need to benchmark it against a current chip from someone else.

[acdha]

You're certainly correct for, say, highly-controlled benchmarks but don't discount subjective user experience. I've heard _far_ more M1 users talk about the subjective feel compared to even the previous generation MacBook hardware whereas it's been a long time since I've heard that about an Intel to Intel upgrade (basically since the Core -> Core Duo period) other than people with GPU-heavy needs and that seems like an interesting data-point to me.

[CountHackulus]

I do wonder how much of that is just getting a nice new laptop? If the average user was handed the equivalent laptop with an Intel CPU but told it was an M1 would they notice? Would they also think it was nice and fast?

[gls2ro]

Here is why I think your hypothesis is not true: people were buying new Macs also before M1, but it did not generated the same reactions. So newness is not the cause of this or at least it is not the only cause.

[athrowaway3z]

Good marketing definitely impacts user experience. How much it is impacting the perception of M1? I have no idea.

[acdha]

Did Apple not market new hardware for a decade prior to M1? I don’t think this is sufficient to explain the difference, especially given the supporting benchmarks.

[acdha]

Possibly but it feels like that should have but has not happened to anything like this degree when people were getting shiny new Intel CPUs after the early 2010s.

[bananabreakfast]

Absolutely. Performance is very noticeable even between the current MBP Intel vs. M1

[manigandham]

What other current chip provides this much performance while using so little power? Objective measurements also show the M1 far ahead.

[SubiculumCode]

yeah, especially given the leaps AMD has made.