> The discussion seems to have settled down to "M1 is great! But you'll soon be able to get a Zen 3 CPU that's just as good." Which may or may not be true

Even if it is, I doubt there will be a Zen 3 laptop out that has the screen, keyboard, trackpad, and case quality of the MBAir. Even if it were slower, literally no one is building machines of that physical quality.

Some are attempting to compete, like the Dell XPS, but they're still falling short. They're high quality laptops, yes, but people who think they're "just as good" need to take a better look at the current MBAir - and this has 0% to do with the chip. Nobody is making laptops this nice.

I'm actually thinking about picking up an Intel MBAir (the one that just got discontinued) as it's likely the single best Linux-able laptop (no longer) on the market, even if it needs to do an opaque, closed-source, online activation each time you wipe the disk (to reactivate the T2).

I bought a new 13' Intel MBP just before the announcement as I needed an x86 machine for development and was nervous it would be discontinued!

> The discussion seems to have settled down to "M1 is great! But you'll soon be able to get a Zen 3 CPU that's just as good."

It feels worse than that to me. Those people are actually saying "But Zen 4 in 2 years will be just as good!" because their claims depend on combining IPC improvements from Zen 3 _and_ a 5nm process that AMD has no plans to switch to for Zen 3. It's a weird bit of gymnastics in order to reach emotional parity with the M1 widely available right now today.

Without commenting on the gymnastics (I'm not qualified) the big issue for me is about actually having the machines in the market. Some of the Ryzen laptops seem to be impossible to buy and who knows how much TSMC capacity AMD has (after the Xbox and PS cores) plus how much and for how long have the PC laptop manufacturers already committed to Intel.

> which will do wonders both for their and Arm's brand.

Apple’s brand, yes, definitely. Arm’s brand? Not so much.

Apple have made a very concerted effort to ensure that when the public thinks of the M1, that it is an Apple chip, and not an Arm chip.

I imagine that Arm isn’t too thrilled with that.

Arm doesn't care. Their customers aren't end consumers, their customers are large integrators like Apple.

It's done Arm's brand a power of good with the sort of people who read HN and that's probably the audience that they care about most.

Adding up to 1.8m (!!!) iOS and iPad apps (including games) to the platform was probably one of the biggest changes as a result of the M1.

I wish I was a more knowledgeable developer because I see an enormous opportunity to fill those gaps.