Good question. Random guess: there are a lot of M1 holdouts they're trying to encourage to upgrade?

There are a few such comments here already!

The customer base on M1 is larger and more likely to be interested in upgrading. The M1 Air was only discontinued in March and is still for sale through Walmart and Costco. Not to mention the resale market created by all the people that moved to M2 and M3. There are tons of M1s out there. It is probably the most relevant comparison they could make, even though we're accustomed to seeing previous-gen benchmarks on everything.

Sadly these days it's a waste to upgrade a single generation. There's very few workloads that work poorly on gen x-1 and work well on gen x.

So while frustrating to people that want to geek out on the tiny details, the real market for Apple is people not using Apple silicon and maybe the M1 users. Upgrading from M2 or M3 isn't worth it. Thus the comparisons with Intel Macs and M1s.

Think of this more as marketing. The realistic benchmarks that matter to the rest of us will be out shortly: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

It makes sense as the group that are most likely to upgrade are using M1 or below, the others will wait for few more generations

- less impressive results

- most people don't care because they're not contemplating upgrading after one year

- those who care will find the benchmarks elsewhere

People who bought M3 arent the target customers. It's those who jumped into the M architecture first with the M1s.