Jason Snell, writing at Macworld:
In that first event (which you can relive in the YouTube video
below), Apple announced its first wave of M1 Macs: the MacBook
Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. The
Macs themselves all used the same design as their Intel
predecessors, as Apple wrapped potentially scary new technology in
completely familiar shapes.Then the results of the first M1 speed tests arrived, and nothing
felt scary anymore. Everything was fast, much faster than Intel,
so much faster that even software compiled for Intel running in a
code-translation layer via Rosetta ran just fine. In fact, the M1
was such a fast chip that, five years later, Apple’s still selling
the M1 MacBook Air. (For $599, at Walmart.) And it’s still a
pretty nice computer! […]The result of all of this is, though every generation has its
quirks, Apple has managed to not drop the ball after the
gigantic leap from Intel to M1. Every generation of M-series
processors has offered impressive speed boosts. Apple’s CPU
cores just get 10% to 30% faster every generation. The GPU cores
got faster in all but one generation–and in that generation,
overall graphics performance still got faster because the chips
all had more GPU cores.
These first five years of Apple Silicon Macs have been the best five-year-run for Mac hardware in the platform’s 41-year history. Hardware-wise, the Mac platform has never been in better shape. And there’s no sign of letup. I fully expect the next five years to be, if anything, even better than the last five — with MacBooks expanding to lower price points, and Mac Pros, finally, expanding the high end of personal supercomputing.
