Apple is paying for exclusive access to TSMC's next node. That improves their final products, but doesn't make their architecture inherently better.
I don't mean to take away from how impressive they are.
>You should only care about a set of processors that is available in the market at the same time. The M4 is available now and Zen 6 is not.
I can't buy an M4, it's not available in the market.
Apple goes one step further though: M processors aren't just unavailable to consumers, there's also no way for OEMs to build systems using these chips. In this point they differ significantly from the examples you mentioned. For people that do not want to buy into the Apple ecosystem, M chips are effectively not on the market, and benchmark comparisons to desktop or server CPUs are meaningless.
The second part of your argument is currently correct but that will change shortly. There is no reason to lock into the apple ecosystem. M4 support is underway in Linux though not yet available. You can easily use a Mac mini as a server running Linux.
No, them only being available as part of Apple products and thus not on the CPU market was my original point. I should probably have been more explicit in my original comments. I don't believe I have been moving goalposts, but your interpretation of the point I was trying to make might have changed.
When it was only the iPad with the M4, it was easier to be sympathetic to your cause, since the iPad is totally locked down and isn't a general purpose computing device since it can't run arbitrary code. But now the Mac Mini is available. It is a general purpose computing device, and you can install Firefox and Linux or whatever you want.
It doesn't meet the level of hardware vendor purity you're asking for, sure, but that's a more ideological now that there's a general purpose computer with the M4 for sale. (Just wish it were cheaper.)
And since it just went on sale today, I was highlighting that, since other readers might want to know that they can now get a computer with an M4.