This benchmark places the M1 Max as 25% geekb multicore compute abvantage over an i9-11900 plus GPU equal to the Radeon Pro W5700 included other Apple offerings.
This shows Apple is more than ready to step out on its own compared to the pack of the PC industry.
Again, this is in a laptop. Unless Intel is keeping a big secret, there's nothing in Intel lineup that portends of Apple getting stuck in the mud of its own garden. It can live totally on its own now and owns the entire stack top to bottom. That's a supremely advantageous position if you have a strong take on what the market wants.
It's impossible to eclipse Apple's designs within the era of Alder Lake, and that has to carry the Intel pack for the next couple years. Microsoft and Linux appear to be in disarray on how to advance applications performance, because neither one has any idea at all about what would make their regular Joes happier. The creative workflows that Apple can excel at are a niche within a niche for the PC market. Apple is maintaining its luxury caché.
There's a counter initiative conclusion I draw for the big picture: Apple is doing an excellent job refining its lineup, and creative pros in the Apple stack will not want for anything performance-wise, but the game isn't changing.
There's no real innovation going on because PC are just a way to pass the cost of maintaining a content distribution channel on to the content consumers. People do what they're told and some of us make the instruction manuals for the others, which makes us feel somewhat liberated.
But the truth is the industry that makes this stuff doesn't want ordinary people to be in control of their own data, by the reasoning that ordinary people don't actually own any data (so to speak regarding "ownership" content is not the information you need to have an active civic life, content is something you are rented which keeps you busy).
The next revolution is something none of the makers of this tech want, and the compute power to accomplish the work people are hungry to do already exists.The design of these system actually hides from people what they would prefer.
What we want is to be our own publishing houses, repping the content we like, in a scalable service distribution network maintained at commodities prices, with no one having the power to censor our views.
Basically to fully realize the promise of the desktop-publishing revolution.
Content mediators hate this idea! Nothing would be worse to them than people in personal arbitrage over their preferences of content with a disconnection between the device used to control the publishing service and the devices that host the service network and full control over their own data, because by definition you don't actually own any data.
De-mediating content would be like freeing slaves. Apple knew this back when Steve Jobs was pushing "Rip, Mix, Burn" He knew the midgame was to seem to give something away: the power of users to curate their own music library, which Apple would get to take back on behalf of the distribution conglomerates with iCloud and the Music store.
Apple has been working as hard as it can to create a fortress wall around its plantation and to control all ingress/egress from the compound. And this fortress is close to being done.
And strangely, today there's not much overt concern among users about being stuck in the plantation. Our infotainment needs are being comfortably satisfied to the limited extent that we have any idea what constitutes our freedom. Basically this stuff is delicious so keep eating. Disney and NYT will make your reality and the reality you are given will incur no other needs for reality outside of the given reality.
It's horrifying actually but it works really well.
The problem is that it's killing art, and leaving us intoxicated and incapacitated from taking on the solutions to very pressing civic problems, and it's making us crazy.
Apple thinks it's strategy makes society very governable. But they could not be heading any more directly away from the intellectual ideals they praised with the marketing of Einstein, Picaso, and Dylan.
We have to come around to seeing that at this juncture, the Apple idea of the PC has run its course. There simply is no innovation outside of a streamlined plantation and its almost impossible to use these devices in a way that suits your own creative drives.
In all seriousness, your iPhone wants to tell you when to go to bed.
The justification for this incredibly restrictive and paternalistic modality is the bugaboo of computer crime, but if you investigate the idea of crime, 99% of the opportunities come from crappy SW engineering in a get rich quick post-dotcom culture of greed by which all of todays most successful companies are survivors of lawless industry internecine warfare.
We are on the technological brink of a new more democratic direction, but to get there we will have to reinvent the PC to forget about most of what we know about "the desktop" and apps and a end-user device centric interface.
Where is are the new phreakers when we need them?
The door is wide open over in Linux land.
Over and out for now.