[skohan]

Does anyone seriously think the performance of the M2 processor will have any meaningful impact on Apple's success?

They made a big splash with the M1 macbook air, which was at the time an incredible value, and the clear best laptop on the market in terms of price/performance hands down. Apple was able to get splashy headlines, and assert their silicon was not just competitive with, but better than Intel and AMD. That's the critical goal they had to reach to validate Apple Silicon as a valid contender in the market.

This year, they're iterating on the design, and getting the market to accept a 20% price increase on the macbook air, which is their mass-market product.

Does anything they do from here on out actually depend on them continuing to win in the semiconductor space? It's not as if these chips are competing for server slots, where winning comes down to raw numbers in terms of performance/Watt.

These macbooks are going to be absolutely fine for the foreseeable future for everything anyone needs a mac to do: video editing, coding, content consumption etc. run absolutely great on these devices which have excellent battery life and great user experience.

[gumby]

Also Apple has lots of knobs to turn due to the high degree of vertical integration. There is a lot of slack they can pick up in OS performance (e.g. process scheduler, memory management). So their overall benchmarks can continue to trend up even if the locus of improvement varies.