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You seem to be doing a lot of gymnastics to try to put the chips on a level playing field, but this doesn't make any sense to me at all. They're fundamentally

You seem to be doing a lot of gymnastics to try to put the chips on a level playing field, but this doesn't make any sense to me at all. They're fundamentally different architectures, so when the Air experiences the jump in performance that it did, you can't just hand wave that away because "well if Intel had smaller and cooler cores, it wouldn't be as big of a difference". On the contrary - this is the entire point. Anecdotally, my 1st gen M1 air is significantly faster at almost every task when compared to my last-gen i9 16" MacBook Pro. It seems your argument is just that some increments are smaller than other increments? It seems the primary point is that the move to M1 was a much larger jump than most jumps. Anyone who has been purchasing Apple hardware over the years experienced this in a very practical sense.

Maursault 4y ago
The Air does not work as a counter example. It is one model, one single model saw performance increases of 150% in multicore performance, and understanding why is important, because NONE of the other models saw anywhere near that performance increase and much closer to 30%-40% increases across the board. And the level of these increases is slightly more than the increases seen from the second to last gen Intels and the last gen Intels. And those performance increases were slightly more than the third to the last Intels to the second to the last Intels. And the further you go back, the smaller the performance gains are, but fundamentally all of these performance gains are incremental and not abrupt. They follow Apple's trend of increasing performance incrementally at each new release.