For years we've been evolving. I've owned ~6 laptops over the last 10 years, all Intel Macs. Each year you get about ~20% ~performance increase for the same "costs" (weight, battery, price).
This year you get about 100% performance increase and the costs are all halved. Ok, so... we'll call it a "huge" evolution. All I know is I've been waiting since the air came out for this laptop to exist: fast enough to handle all my work, with decent battery life. It's been almost a decade of waiting, and not only did it finally come, but it somehow is much faster than even the biggest of last generation and super cheap.
If you made a graph showing (price * perf * battery-life * weight) you'd see a nice evolutionary curve over the last decade, and then this generation you'd see a huge jump - way more than double. You're ignoring the fact this is a 10W CPU doing more than 28W, fanless! And the diff in subjective performance isn't small, it feels bigger than any previous generation jump by quite a lot...
AMD laptops are also crushing this generation of Intel laptops. AnandTech's comparison shows that M1 vs AMD is mostly a power/performance trade-off at the moment.
Not that the M1 isn't exciting especially in the ultrabook segment.
This year you get about 100% performance increase and the costs are all halved. Ok, so... we'll call it a "huge" evolution. All I know is I've been waiting since the air came out for this laptop to exist: fast enough to handle all my work, with decent battery life. It's been almost a decade of waiting, and not only did it finally come, but it somehow is much faster than even the biggest of last generation and super cheap.
If you made a graph showing (price * perf * battery-life * weight) you'd see a nice evolutionary curve over the last decade, and then this generation you'd see a huge jump - way more than double. You're ignoring the fact this is a 10W CPU doing more than 28W, fanless! And the diff in subjective performance isn't small, it feels bigger than any previous generation jump by quite a lot...