I consider myself a tech person and was immediately intrigued by the claims. Because I thought Apple could do it. And, after getting the Mac Mini in my hands as the only Apple computer in the house, I can mostly confirm it is quite astounding.

Maybe adding to the mystique helped some sales from curious people; it would help explain why benchmarks have been kept quiet and vague for the most part, even though they are very impressive.

I’ve witnessed single core performance on this device that I have not seen before and likely would need overclocking to hit if it can be done. For some workloads, it’s truly something.

Even thinking about it, I do expect some of this move was about performance, especially performance per watt. I doubt any other mobile processor is holding a candle at the moment. The control grabs, I think, might be secondary.