The obvious question is why has Qualcomm failed so hard at even keeping up with the A series? They're untouchable for radio stuff but their CPUs are very average. Samsung are also trying very hard with average results.
The M1 isn't Apple's first crack at this that is some fluke which will quickly be overtaken by someone else. Everyone else has already been in a race to beat their A-series chips and failed miserably. The M1 is just the first time we've been able to benchmark it on a real OS. If someone beats it, it will be AMD retooling their cores and doing it in 3-5 years (Zen was originally battling an ARM variant internally at AMD)
Android occupies the lower-end side of the phone market, so there's less of a drive for the absolute highest performance. There has until very recently been almost zero desktop or laptop ARM market or server ARM market.
Apple also has a ridiculous amount of cash sitting around and could afford to fund R&D ahead of market demand and develop a truly killer ARM architecture. Everyone else is now behind, but what I'm saying is that there's not much in the M1 that is secret. It's just well-understood performance CPU engineering techniques deployed well on an ARM chip and the added efficiency is largely due to the lack of X86 cruft overhead and the 5nm node.
The rest of us can get on with using the otherwise wasted power of all these tiny computers.
Think of the waste caused by Apples profiteering.
Whats that about Apple waste? Its people that waste and drive waste.
Id love it if I could load my own OS and do whatever on this little phone, but only if iOS itself was still locked up. I dont need to add even more worry about the safety of my “phone” (really portfolio of everything Ive done since Ive been online)
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/02/08/how-to-download-o...
It was also possible to backup and restore apps individually through iTunes.
I do remember the individual app backup+restore, which I would have done if I'd known that I was going to need it. But I didn't have any data I cared about (just my music, which was already in iTunes), so I figured I'd just reinstall the apps. I remember re-jailbreaking my iPod afterwards and trying to find an old version of Spotify to install online, but being unable to find a trustworthy source.
This nails it. I want full control and the ability to run anything on my computer. I want my phone to "just work" and I never want to fuck with it or worry about what's on it. They are different devices with different roles.
What I do wish for is open ARM hardware with similar performance. I am totally certain that it is coming now that Apple has demonstrated just what is possible. Ampere, Samsung, Marvell, etc. are surely working on high performance designs now if they weren't already.
There is nothing magic about what Apple did with the M1. They built a really high performance ARM core by applying a lot of the same things that have been done for high performance in the X86 world but without the X86 dead elephant strapped to their back. The M1 can be duplicated if not exceeded.