I wasn't expecting Apple to follow an Intel tick-tock model, they had ground to makeup against Intel for stagnating for so long. M2 is an incremental improvement, and not by much. Given how small it was, they should have phased out M1 and just silently-ish slipped M2 into the stream. Push the remaining M1s into ipads and low end macbook airs.
They could have pulled off another step function, widening the path to main memory, more cache, more efficiency cores, doubled the width to the SSDs. There is about 18 months of time between front end design that goes into the next version. The chip design is cut off before everything you want to go in, goes in. That makes it into V2 before V1 has even shipped. It isn't until V3 that one gets to incorporate changes from the field into the next chip design.
Basically, I was hopeful that Apple chip dev team was going to go as hard as possible to gain distance against the competition, but they pulled the MBA maximum market extraction play but the market softened and the perf increase wasn't there. They bet wrong.
They could have pulled off another step function, widening the path to main memory, more cache, more efficiency cores, doubled the width to the SSDs. There is about 18 months of time between front end design that goes into the next version. The chip design is cut off before everything you want to go in, goes in. That makes it into V2 before V1 has even shipped. It isn't until V3 that one gets to incorporate changes from the field into the next chip design.
Basically, I was hopeful that Apple chip dev team was going to go as hard as possible to gain distance against the competition, but they pulled the MBA maximum market extraction play but the market softened and the perf increase wasn't there. They bet wrong.
Fingers crossed M3 is the next step function.