They could sell you a downgrade and still stay 2x M1 Pro performance (it was 4x from last year)
Apple is a marketing company made to sell stuff.
That's like... every company? Are you saying they don't have good tech?
Ya sure, you can say that every company must do that, but apple are exceptional at it. Once you start noticing the unlabeled performance charts, the missing baselines, the comparing with ages old models, the disingenuous "86x" metrics, the whole show becomes cringe worthy.
I will, yes. If macOS supported Vulkan, then those Intel Macs would have GPU acceleration too, and thus it would be a fair fight comparing it to MPS. Apple's tech stack is so miserly and poor that they never supported the common GPGPU libraries that literally every single OEM is and was shipping.
Apple's tech is appalling. Are you saying they exercise good judgement on behalf of their users?
So saying their tech is "appealing" is a matter of opinion and I'd argue something a small minority of their users care about. But I don't know.
https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/#footnote-4
So yes, that is compared to a very old 14 nm design, presumably the i7-8557U per Wikipedia.
It's not that the comparison is incorrect, just that it's a silly and unenlightening statement, bordering on completely devoid of meaning if it weren't for the x86 pun.