I blame Intel. For years i9 wasn’t just a “beefed up i7”, it was a high end line of CPUs with 10+ cores costing $1000+, meant for professional workstations that

I blame Intel. For years i9 wasn’t just a “beefed up i7”, it was a high end line of CPUs with 10+ cores costing $1000+, meant for professional workstations that didn’t need Xeon’s ECC RAM support. Then suddenly i9 started to also mean “a beefed up i7”. Maybe they did this in the hope that the i9 HEDT “brand halo” would help them sell more of these consumer CPUs. But if that’s the case, they don’t get to complain when someone posts that an M1 beat an i9 and people accidentally interpret that as “the M1 competes against Intel’s HEDT line”.