Generally this is surprising because the user bought the "Air" model instead of his usual "pro" model which is much more expensive. The impressive part here is that the air outperforms last years pro (according to the author) which is 3x the price.
they used to be priced at roughly 3x markup compared to the market. they finally fixed their co-dependency with intel and suddenly wow the price gouging goes out the door because gasp the macbook air could have always been the pro it was just never possible with using old chips.
ANYTHING using arm absolutely FLIES
open your eyes people
the arm chromebooks like the lenovo duet absolutely murder the iPad pro or even the new iPad Air in terms of actually being a useful OS for devs
as an ex macbook pro main, I bought 3 of them over the course of last decade and a half and they have always had older intel brains than any xps or razer stealth I would try to cross shop with. after m1 apples price to performance ratio is at unreal levels
Were they though? With comparable displays and build quality, I think their laptops have been competitive with the upper end of the market for a while now, with maybe a 10-20% markup on that.
I was more mad at the general markup relative to similar intel chips in say a Dell or HP ultralight
I daily drive a lenovo duet and its absolutely the closest thing to perfection in the modern computing realm. Its a surface go but running arm and chromeos and it flies thru all of my webapps like Framer, Figma, Plectica, Notion, Photopea, Visual Studio Code, Blender etc
m1 is scary fast, but also x64 is dead and needs to be transitioned to the new age. Apple or not this is a major shift in the dev market
and not only in $800+ price
the duet is $300