I do take slight issue with the section about RAM performance. The idea in the article is that M1 Mac runs software that uses reference-counting instead of garbage collection as its memory model (i.e. Objective-C and Swift software). Two issues…

1/ Sure, but that's also the case with with x86 Intel Macs. Still running reference-counting Obj-C and Swift software for the most part. So how is this a M1 differentiator?

2/ Also, Macs run plenty of software that mostly uses garbage collection, e.g. any Electron app (Spotify, Slack, Superhuman, etc.) is mostly implemented in GC'd Javascript. There's also plenty of software written with other runtimes like Java or implementing a GC.

So this does nothing to explain why 8GB of RAM on an OS X device with an M1 chip is better than 8GB of RAM on an OS X device with an x86 chip from Intel.