Is it a good point though? I mean, I've already said that in my situation, I do not care about power consumption. I'm not saying this isn't a good feature of the M1, it is just irrelevant when you're plugged in, and you can dissipate the heat. Both of these are the case when I work, so I would consider it to have no downsides, with a 3x speedup. Likewise, this is not relevant for those who have such power constraint, that need to work on 10 hour long train rides. I'm not sure what is so difficult about accepting these constraints, since most replies so far to my post about "if power consumption isn't relevant to you" with "well, the power consumption is much better".

The point here was the nostalgic "I miss the days when computer performance increased noticeably", which apparently hasn't happened for a while, until the M1 came along. If it is performance you're after, the only way that sentiment could hold true, was if you limiting yourself to the rather poor performance in older apple hardware. Just think about it... if a 1.33 speedup would give this feeling, imagine what a 4x speedup would feel like.

So, it's not that I think the M1 is bad. It's that these posts that keep popping up, week after week on Hacker News, which go to some lengths to show how the M1 is 30% faster at some heavy work load than the older, and much worse Intel processors. It just seems strange.

That's a good point. Yet for how long can the M1 sustain maximum performance, even with fans? And at what temperatures?

Regardless, it's good to see some innovation--no matter how much hype is involved.

I'm no expert, but with a 15W power draw the answer to the "how long" question is likely to be "perpetually" with active cooling. Now, Apple tends to let its processors run very hot before throttling (I had an old i5 MacBook which easily hit 98C), but again, a 15W power draw means there isn't all that much energy to push into whatever heat sink or cooling solution they want to use. (In the real world it's rather more complicated, with different load intensity on different parts of the SoC, but still)