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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

What really impressed me in this was not the expected M1 to older x86 performance gap (that poor i9 must have been throttling for the whole benchmark while the fans were preparing the laptop for takeoff) but the fact you can get a much faster laptop with 4x as much memory for about the same price from Apple just a couple years later…

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The Intel chipsets were limited for a long time in that they could only support a maximum of 16GB of LPDDR ram. Yet another reason Apple must have been frustrated with Intel.

Is there a reason Intel put that limitation in place?

Product segmentation probably

Incompetence.

Of the management maybe, but it's not like the Intel staff who managed to pretty much stay competitive with the cutting edge despite them being stuck on 14nm for years forgot how to design a memory controller.

Make that market segmentation instead.

Intel intentionally limits consumer grade hardware in order to create distinct market segments - from overclocking to memory support and PCIe lanes.

True, but that kind of mismanagement is what caused Apple’s migration to Intel in the first place. While it made sense for IBM, losing Apple made no business sense for Intel, as Apple was a valuable showcase partner.

The price given in the article is not correct though, the 16" M1 Max 64GB is actually 3.900 USD (and I presume this is before sales tax, I'm from a country where advertised prices include VAT).

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