It’s an article with many technical words, at least. The author’s conclusions remind me more of how homeopaths talk about their little bottles of water.
The M1 isn’t magical. It’s a well designed chip that trades versatility, upgradability, and external IO for high efficiency(almost exactly like the A-series chips that power iOS devices). If your computer usage fits within the boundaries and constraints Apple set when designing the specific chip you purchased, great! If not… grab your wallet, it’s time to buy a whole new computer.
That isn’t to say you shouldn’t buy an M1; The efficiency makes the M1 macbook a freakin’ awesome device, and the mini is… well, it’s cheap(ish) and good enough. I would skip the MAX and Ultra, though. The IO and storage bottlenecks mean the extra cores and memory bandwidth are only going to be useful for highly specific tasks that don’t really care about IO or storage.
For what it’s worth, both Intel and AMD have made general-purpose SoC’s very much like the M1 for almost a decade now; Aside from a few outliers like the Microsoft Surface, they aren’t designed for or marketed to the consumer PC market, so they’re not really in competition with apple there. AMD launched their Opteron ARM server SoC’s back in 2014 or so, and Intel has been churning out efficiency-focused chips based on their own Atom SoC platform for even longer. Not to mention mobile SoC’s made by Qualcomm, Samsung, or even Apple’s own A-series chips. The only thing revolutionary here is that apple killed production of x64 hardware as soon as they finished macOS for ARM.
