Apple apologist here, but uh, really the M1 isn't a first-gen product, it's more like a TENTH-gen product. It's a direct evolution from the A4 chip series, and

Apple apologist here, but uh, really the M1 isn't a first-gen product, it's more like a TENTH-gen product. It's a direct evolution from the A4 chip series, and apple only did the big sexy "we mean business" rebrand when, after a decade of R&D, they'd basically bred a mouse up to the size of a mammoth. Apple quietly ramped it up year over year; at its initial release, it was just another "me too" phone ARM chip, but as they built it, after a few years they had their own chip design team and were no longer just popping in generic ARM Cortex designs. Then it quietly got 2, then 3x faster than the other phones on the market. Finally it reached full parity with common-market intel chips; apple made sure their "intel on arm" emulator was working well. They still didn't release it! They waited a couple more years - until it was so fast that even emulated, it would be comparable with a brand new low-end intel machine, and then, finally, they branded it as the M1 and released it. --- Google's strategy seems to be playing out really similarly. Put it out in the wild in some devices where they won't get flak for the usual teething problems. Work all of those out, and then, once it's pretty robust, make the big confident "sexy play" to deploy it on an android phone.