Moorhead's review literally contains this sentence:
> The new M1 processor is impressive, but far from perfect- it has many warts, that nearly nobody is discussing.
He then proceeds to describe not warts of the M1 as a processor, but rather warts of the 3rd party software ecosystem. I think overall the review is fine and not in bad faith, but it's easy to see how people are latching on to that sentence. If he were honest about making it a review about the overall product experience, rather than the silicon, he wouldn't need to write that sentence.
which is the result of the change in processor. There is, of course, an undertone of bias in the review against the M1.
It's like someone reviewing a tesla car and complain that it's difficult to charge because there's not enough chargers in the road networks and gas stations don't cater for electric vehicles. A valid complaint about the tesla car, but not caused directly by the quality/capability of the car itself.
It seems obvious that Morehead's opinion seven years ago about 64bit being unnecessary in mobile was incorrect, mainly because today's mainstream phones ship with more RAM than 32bit would support, but that doesn't mean every word Morehead types is now ritually unclean. He was wrong about something; it hurts his credibility but doesn't banish him from the conversation.
Besides, unless we think Morehead doctored his screenshots, it's pretty hard to argue that his review is nonfactual in its entirety.
More specifically to your point, I don't see why there has to be a separation between hardware quality and software experience when the user (A) can't buy the hardware without paying for the OS too, and (B) can't use the hardware without using the OS too.
Possibly, but if it was, it shouldn’t have a sentence “The new M1 processor is impressive, but far from perfect- it has many warts, that nearly nobody is discussing” in the second paragraph of the article.
Take that entire second paragraph away, and I don’t think we would have this discussion now. I thought it is bad writing, but am not sure anymore. It also could be a very good attempt at getting lots of page views.
> An Hungarian researcher by the name of Dezsö Sima offers an exhaustive history of Apple processors [1] that shows the transition to homegrown cores clearly started with the A6 device.
Extrapolate what a hypothetical 4+4 big.LITTLE A14X with 8 GPU cores would look like compared to the 2+4 A14 with 4 GPU cores and you don't need anything other than the progress of past Apple silicon SoCs to predict the characteristics of the M1.
Apple Silicon is outpacing the competition on all fronts. Qualcomm, Samsung, Intel, and AMD are not keeping up. Huawei has been knocked out of the competition, mostly by geopolitics as far as I can tell. The only question was the timing of the MacOS pivot. The A12X was good enough for a MacBook Air but a compromise for a MacBook Pro. The M1 is a no-compromise SoC for MacOS and the only question is the execution of the software transition; the focus of Gruber and Moorhead's spat.
[1] https://users.nik.uni-obuda.hu/sima/letoltes/Processor_famil...
edit: Downvote if you want, I'm not kidding. Disingenuous hot takes without much connection to reality is a feature over at Forbes when it comes to tech, not a bug. They're literally traffic mercenaries over there. I'm sure Moorhead is smarting maybe little from the internet anger, but also not too upset to collect a nice bonus before Christmas. I'm sure another Forbes contributor will reprise the role of shit-stirrer-in-chief for the inevitable M2 as well.
Do you not think it's the least bit concerning that Moorhead has Intel, AMD and NVIDIA as his clients?
Do you really think he can write an unbiased piece about a competitor of theirs when they put food on his table?
(EDIT: For reference, I'm in the 4x4/travel world and write for a stack of magazines. Big car OEMs fly journalists all around the world, put them in expensive hotels, feed them 5 course meals and then have them review their new vehicles. I want you to guess what percentage of those reviews are absolutely glowing. )
Catalina obsoleted a lot of apps that many companies did not bother to update before or after which does not bode well for Apple Silicon. The hope to hold out for is that the performance is so good that people really want the systems and that brings out the developers.
Still, you can still get acceptable Windows Laptops with SSD/Etc for half the price of a MBA and that still means a lot. That you don't have to look twice at software to know if it runs is a big deal as well
> As pointed out in John Gruber’s hard takedown of Moorhead’s piece, most of the problems he encountered were software problems, not M1 hardware issues.
Morehead's allegiances and work are relevant biases, as are Gruber's. But Morehead's review wasn't of the M1 processor or architecture as a technology. It was a review of the 13" M1 MacBook Pro as an end-user device.
Software problems _are_ worth raising in a review of who should buy an M1 MacBook, and why someone shouldn't.
Because of the architecture change, the M1 has to come up — to omit its role in requiring Rosetta would be lying through omission. It's not an indictment of the technology, and shouldn't be controversial, for an end-user review to say the first OS revision targeting the first generation of a piece of hardware maybe isn't ready for every task thrown at it, especially those that rely on the newest of the new software components. It's why my workplace isn't even mostly on Catalina yet, much less Big Sur.
For the love of whatever stupid internet points people are trying to win, let Morehead's review go. It's contributor report on Forbes, which makes it only slightly more relevant than a Reddit post. Folks can absolutely find better things to squabble over about these computers.