I don't know what's up with your comment, but you more or less contradict yourself. First of all, the switch to Apple Silicon, from each specific model, brought about a 30% increase in single core performance and a 40% increase in multi-core performance. It's a few more percents than the increases in performance from the second to last Apple Intels to the last Apple Intels, which was a few more percents performance than the third to the last Intels to the second to last Intels. Seeing the trend here? Apple's releases were never twice as fast as the last revision of a particular model. I'm pretty sure that's true of every hardware provider, Dell, HP, Acer, whatever. New models are always incrementally more performant than the last generation of that particular model. That is the way it's always been, so it shouldn't be such a surprise when the M2 Max is only 30% performant than the M1 Max in whatever model machine that was upgraded.
Now here is your contradiction:
> Each of the M1 products has been a big step up from the preceding versions in almost every respect and especially performance.
> ARM architecture by itself is not significant performance advantage or competitive advantage at all, and there's no real secret sauce in Apple's chip program other than tight focus, a long time horizon, and massive amounts of cash. And CPU performance growth is slower than it once was as anyone who remembers the road from the 286 to the Pentium Pro can attest.
These statements conflict. I agree with your second statement. Regarding Apple Silicon, the leap forward was in power efficiency, in the platform switch, which by itself was pretty amazing, the performance increases are NOT 200% increases across the board on all models. Apple Silicon is roughly a third faster than the previous Apple Intel model generation, up a small amount of increase from the previous Intel generation to the last, and if you go back through the models you'll see these performance gains have been increasing, but the gains are incrementally faster on an incremental performance gain at each generation. This shouldn't be surprising. What is surprising is you and everyone raving about the massive performance gains that aren't there. There is a performance gain, but it is not earth-shattering, like if each gen was performing twice as fast as the previous. They're not, and they won't, if they ever do, for years if not decades. The refreshes are always incremental, Apple Silicon is no exception.