> 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!
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.