> Same here. It’s a very efficient laptop, but the way reviewers repeated the Apple marketing hype made me expect something even faster.
You make it sound like the reviewers mindlessly regurgitate Apple’s material. Actual proper reviews like Anandtech’s have numbers very close to Apple’s figures.
Now, you get diminishing returns in a lot of daily tasks so perceived performance is not proportional to benchmark scores (a 2x speedup when you open an application is not very meaningful when it took 0.5s anyway). But it does not mean that the reviews were inaccurate.
> But if you’ve been using anything other than last-gen Macs to compare against, the M1 feels more like catching up to current performance standards as opposed to the media narrative about being faster than anything else out there.
More like leapfrogging. Which is fine, AMD and Intel are doing it all the time and the world is not ending for either company.
The narrative is that it is faster than anything else at equivalent power consumption. Sure, you can get overclocked i9s that are faster, but not in a laptop with a ~1 day battery life.
> Same goes for the graphics. It’s really impressive for a laptop but the slides about the Mac Studio performing like a 3090 are a joke. At least the media has started to call Apple out on some of the exaggerated GPU claims.
We’ll see. As usual, the truth will be in the numbers.
It’s not completely absurd that something larger than a 3090 with vastly better memory bandwidth could be competitive. The M1 is going to be worse at things like ray tracing, most probably, but the 3090 itself is not more magic than M1s.