I read Gruber frequently even though he annoys me (he's sort of like John Dvorak that way), and this piece is kind of emblematic of why he does. To be clear, the ARM Macs are way more exciting than I expected, and I'll probably buy one at some point. I also do not think Moorhead's Fortune article was perfect, but Gruber's righteous indignation is grating.
These statements are pitted against each other, even though they are both very much true:
> emulating or translating apps ... is necessarily going to be ... somewhat incompatible at best ... But Apple’s Rosetta 2 ... is a technical marvel.
He's upset about this quote from Moorhead's review:
> there were some very positive things about the new laptop. The new M1 processor is impressive, but far from perfect — it has many warts
Moorhead perhaps punctuated this poorly, but I think it's reasonable to assume that the warts refer to "the new laptop" in general, not just "the new M1 processor" in particular. Yes, his problems are generally software related (although he cited fan noise as a complaint), but that's a huge part of the product. Lots of people would love to use an M1 Mac without macOS, including one particular Finn.
Gruber can say, "There is no 'Well, here’s the downside' with regard to the state of Apple Silicon," but that remains to be seen. How much of the M1's advantage is due to a trillion dollar company buying up every last bit of TSMC's 5nm production capacity? Can they scale the unified memory architecture much beyond 16 GB? If they can, great; they've truly lapped the field.
> There is no balance, if by balance, you’re looking for a story that says any PC hardware, ARM or x86, is competitive in any way with the M1 Macs for low-energy computing.
This review wasn't about "low-energy computing." It was about using a new Mac as a replacement for an old Mac. This is a real, shipping product, not a beta. You can snicker at Moorhead's Microsoft-centric workflow and choice of apps., but that's his perspective.