alt Hacker NewsSure. Insofar as Apple Silicon beats these things, "I'll take less powerful hardware if it means I'm not stuck with the Apple ecosystem" is a perfectly reasonable tradeoff to make. Two things, though.
First, I don't like making blind tradeoffs. If what I need (for whatever reason) is a really beefy ARM CPU, I'd like to know what the "Apple-less tax" costs me (if anything!)
Second, the status quo is that Apple Silicon is the undisputed king of ARM CPU performance, so it's the obvious benchmark to compare this thing against. Providing that context is just basic journalistic practice, even if just to say "but it's irrelevant because we can't use the hardware without the software".
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Why do you need ARM? There is nothing magic, most CPUs are an internal instruction set with a decoder on top. bad as x86 is, decoding is not the issue. they can make lower power use x86 if they want. They can also make mips or riskv chips that are good.
Let's say my company makes systems for in-flight entertainment, with content from my company.
I am looking for a CPU.
I don't want to confront my users with "Please enter your Apple ID" or any other unexpected messages that I have no control over.
Is Apple M series an option for me?
The problem is you can't really compare things apples to apples anyway. You're always comparing different builds and different OSes to get a sense of CPU performance.