> I submit if you need to qualify your use of the word "laptop" with fully eight adjectives or adjectival phrases to avoid ambiguity with pre-existing products, that it's probably not "revolutionary" by definition.

I count five: It's the first "widely popular", "fully-functional", "powerful", "general purpose" ARM-based laptop ever being "produced on a massive, industrial scale"

My counterpoint: it's revolutionary because it's the first ARM-based laptop which doesn't have to make a ton of compromises to make it out the door.

It's got mass-market appeal ("widely popular", unlike the PineBook Pro).

It's not limited in functional scope ("fully functional", unlike Chromebooks).

It's not limited in computing power ("powerful", unlike any other ARM laptop).

It's not restricted to a subset of tasks ("general-purpose", unlike the iPad Pro when treated as a laptop).

It's being mass-produced for retail, i.e. it's not a limited-run or a prototype ("produced on a massive, industrial scale").

Every other attempt at an ARM laptop has made one or more of these compromises; the M1 Macbooks (and the M1 Mini) don't have any of these compromises, meaning that it's fit-for-purpose for the vast majority of laptop users (those for whom a Macbook would have sufficed before the M1 line).

I think being good and useful is pretty revolutionary; I haven't seen another ARM laptop offer that, and those are pretty important features.

>My counterpoint: it's revolutionary because it's the first ARM-based laptop which doesn't have to make a ton of compromises to make it out the door.

This should not be understated. You could hand an M1 Mac to anyone and unless they were technical and understood what you were handing them, they would neither know nor need to know that it has an entirely different CPU architecture.

It's totally transparent. Not one application did I try did it do anything other than just run as I would have expected. Heck the vast majority of x86 Windows software I tried - either under Crossover (commercially supported version of WINE) or in the Windows 10 ARM beta under Parallels - worked just fine.

And very speedily too. It was not apparent that emulation was going on - at all.

It really is quite astonishing. As they say, seeing is believing - in this case using is believing. The overall feel of the system is just not something that's easily to articulate. It's not just about running a benchmark or application quickly; the whole thing is just more responsive.

The only reason I took my M1 Macbook Air back on the last day of the return window was it turns out to do everything I want if it just had more RAM. Which was NOT my starting position; the M1 ran so well that I ended up realizing it could do everything I wanted and more if I could get at least 32GB of RAM - 64GB would be perfect.

So I'm rather impatiently awaiting the next round. As soon as I can get more RAM I'm so getting another Apple Silicon laptop!

> The M1 is a good CPU. It's incrementally better than the Intel CPUs used in earlier versions of the same product.

I suppose everything can be called incrementally better by some viewpoint but calling it incrementally better than the Intel CPUs used in earlier versions is wild to me. I specifically switched to my first ever Apple product because of how revolutionary the generational step was compared to what we've been getting on x86 laptops year to year and no equivalent x86 laptops of the year came close. Not only is it comparable to my overclocked desktop in tasks from 1-4 cores it does so without kicking on fans and the battery life is astounding while it does it. It even runs emulated x86 software faster than the native x86 version of the same year.

> It trounces the majority of either of those - which something a revolutionary product would do.

This isn't even remotely true. Computers are really good at doing more than one thing at a time. I find it mind-boggling that there is such a focus on the performance of a single core. This hasn't been all that relevant for the last 15 years. As for what this matters, the difference for single core isn't all that big regardless (one M1 core performs about the same as one 5980HS thread). When you want to know how powerful the computing power of a CPU is, how about comparing .. you know... what it can do?

And, what it can do when it is asked to do everything it can, I can reiterate that the M1 is nowhere near the competition. The 5980HS mobile CPU will get the same multi-threaded job done in half the time, which is a huge difference. Which is why discussion threads like these feel... chilling. Like as if I stepped in to a cult meeting, where we praise normalcy as revolutionary. It's not even close to the last generation of CPUs in terms of compute power. It just a step up from the Intel CPUs apple used in the previous MBPs.

And, it's not that the M1 is a bad CPU. It's actually pretty good for what it does, and it is exceptionally good at power efficiency. The 5nm and low thread count does contribute significantly to the power performance, so it will be interesting to to see how future M1 processors perform.

Imagine if the M2 doubled core count, and thus doubled multi-core performance compared to the M1. It would then be just as powerful as the current 5980HS. Another revolution no doubt.

While I agree, I think you're not giving credit to RISC + Apple's vertical integration here. What does it do? It produces a lot less energy per instruction.

I think that other manufacturers will look into their energy usage as well. That's quite revolutionary, because it seems to me that it has shown a proof of concept for which there's a lot of room to grow in. Less energy means less heat, less heat means you can crank up clock cycles.

My thinking is simplistic but I think someone with more understanding of it will tend to agree with my high level view and tell you exactly why this is revolutionary.

Note: I'm not giving Apple full credit here, I'm giving it half credit. The other half goes to the invention of ARM and RISC micro-architecture in general.

That's still evolutionary not revolutionary. Every CPU intended for laptops over the last 20 years has been both increasing performance and reducing power consumption compared to the generation(s) before them. Apple didn't buck a trend, they didn't do anything new. They "just" had a really good execution of the standard, tried & true improvement path.

This was the whole marketing push behind projects like Intel Centrino - to drive even lower system power consumption by mandating certain combinations of certain parts that worked well together. Which continued with things like Intel Atheno & Evo.

Nothing Apple did with the M1 changed the game. It's the same game, it's the same race it's always been, they just are now in the lead of that race with their car. Which is impressive in its own right, but definitely not "revolutionary"

> Less energy means less heat, less heat means you can crank up clock cycles.

This goes the other way around. To improve efficiency you reduce the clock cycles and increase IPC instead. That was the M1's advancement over the status quo, a significant increase in IPC. Clock speeds didn't change - in fact, it regressed by a tremendous amount. This regression in clock speed is how the M1 consumes so little power by comparison.

No, it doesn't. If it did we'd be seeing similar performance from other ARM CPU vendors, and we aren't. Apple pulling far ahead of Intel is largely independent of them using ARM and more a function of how much investment their poured into their own chips.

IMHO for every invention that's the definition of "revolutionary" that matters.

The first lightbulb isn't revolutionary, it's a nifty toy invention that doesn't affect anything, much less cause a revolution like the first practical efficient general purpose mass produced lightbulbs did.

The first radio isn't revolutionary, the first practical efficient general purpose mass produced radios make the revolution.

The same for computers, the same for smartphones - iPhone was revolutionary because it impacted the world; while its competing predecessors that had almost the same tech did not and so were not revolutionary.

lol - if you had actually used one, rather than pontificating in an Internet comment thread, you would not be describing the M1 as an "incremental" improvement.

It's night and day. Readily noticeable by non-technical people. It's not just faster, it's snappier, more responsive and just has an all around different feel.