The Apple spin doctors are hard at work. This is one way to see things. The way I see it, is that M3 performance cores are faster in some situations but also n

The Apple spin doctors are hard at work. This is one way to see things. The way I see it, is that M3 performance cores are faster in some situations but also not that much faster. The efficiency cores are almost as fast as M1 cores but also the conditions to get there are specific. Since they actually removed performance cores, the overall real-world performance is actually not very enticing. It is somewhat better in some cases but mostly equivalent and sometimes even worse, which is just ridiculous considering the price increase. All this is happening while they significantly increased frequency across the board and they benefit from state-of-the-art fab process. The M3 E cores have 85% of the frequency of the M1 P cores; it is absolutely nothing special that they have about 85% of their performance. Similarly, the M3 P cores use 20% more frequency, so their "performance increase" isn't really something to write home about. In fact, what we can see is that already at the 3rd generation, their chips use enough power at a large density that they became challenging to cool. Plenty of M3 users are complaining about heat and noise just like in the intel days. Their absurd focus on efficiency cores also makes their desktop computers even less valuable than they had already become under apple silicon. They were already overpriced but you are now paying even more for dumb compromised efficiency cores that have no reason to exist on computer plugged into the wall. Their GPUs are still stupidly underpowered for the asking price and their architecture too different enough that porting stuff is more trouble than it could be worth for most developers (as we have recently seen with the cancelation of various software on macOS). Meanwhile Intel just released their first try at an efficient mobile chip and not only they are pretty close but thanks to their GPU investment during covid they even managed to make entry level chips that make low end Apple Silicons SKUs like a pretty bad deal, especially if you are even remotely interested in gaming. There are laptop now going out at the asking price of a base MacBook Air with not only twice the memory/storage but also double the gaming (and every other workload that is close to that) performance at a close enough efficiency and very similar form factor. It seems that we are now in the post AS hype where the situation feels a lot like the PowerPC days. They will pretend they are faster but in fact in most case do much worse at twice the price. Apple needs to revise their commercial strategy or they are in trouble...