Yeah, yes. 
Tim Cook did not shepherd. He just had some dumb luck. M1 was the natural extension of the non-defunct A x chips, which are themselves an extension of the A series, which really took off when Jim Keller made his mark at Apple. It was Keller’s brainchild, not Cook’s creation—full stop. The Apple CPU microarchitecture is one-to-one with its smartphone counterparts. The only distinguishing factors are scaling up in core counts and GPU core counts and additional I/O for laptop and notebook use. Who else is doing that? Hint: Oyron, also created by the top Apple chip engineers at Nuvia who had worked with Keller, in Snapdragon X and Snapdragon 8 Gen 4.
The ol’ “Hifihedgehog hates Apple, Intel, etc. and loves AMD, Qualcomm” hit piece of ad hominem drivel. The truth be told, I used to love Intel back in the Core 2 days and owned Intel systems. I used to make fun of AMD FX and Bulldozer in tech circles all the time. The FX-8350 Black Edition was a dumpster fire. It had less than Intel Atom single-core performance and its only redeeming quality was that it was a 200W+ space heater. Qualcomm wasn’t exactly a favorite of mine either, and when I tried a Galaxy S4 because of a carrier deal, I absolutely hated it. You can check my comment history for the receipts. It was when I learned of Nuvia and Oyron several years ago, much as I did of Zen and Ryzen, from industry moles, that I was hyped for Snapdragon future microarchitecture. Note future. I couldn’t care a flipping flip flop about Qualcomm’s current stuff. Battery life is great, but the performance isn’t there yet.
That’s not possible when Apple’s current IPC improvement last year was 1%, or within the margin of error. That’s the easiest bar in the world to clear when your competitor is at a virtual standstill. I guess you forgot about this post from several months ago. Apple lost their key chip engineers with the formation of Nuvia, and it really shows. You can’t argue with the math below that shows Apple’s chip performance now comes almost exclusively from the manufacturing process or die shrinks that enable higher clock speeds and virtually nothing else. If that doesn’t scream Intel Skylake 2.0, I don’t know what does. Performance leadership is always relative and a fast-moving target, and if you don’t push yourself hard, you’re going to fall behind no matter how strong your leadership was, and that’s Cook’s Apple.
Jobs hand-picked Cook for financials because he was the master of supply chain management, which is the game of all games of incrementalism where such bean counting mental patterns are well-suited. Cook, however, is a poor fit for the CEO’s chair because he lacks the passion and drive of a “mind going a million miles a minute” tech innovator. Technology bets–or lack thereof–take 5-10 years to see the gains and losses, so you need someone whose brain is diving into the details of all the possible technologies. Because Cook lacks the brains to know where to place the bets as Jobs would and is low energy as far as tech CEOs are concerned, we are now seeing the aftereffects of his lack of forethought with their processor’s IPC improvement literally coming to a standstill.
It means there is no improvement in the logical efficiency of their transistor design. It is almost purely clock speed from die shrinks, which is laughable for the world’s top valued company. The Apple hubris is going to be one huge fail in the next year when their performance leadership that Keller handed to them will have flipped and will be anything but.
I am on the fence about it. On the one hand, it is certainly far and away better than the Meta Quest 3, which is blurry and unrefined. On the other hand, it is still a VR headset that is further locked down by the Apple walled garden, has a distinct lack of applications and games, and a price that is a no-go for all but Mr. Pennybags. The excitement that I was seeing a month ago for Vision Pro has all but evaporated and has been replaced by reports of widespread returns due to the “new toy syndrome” wearing off. The Vision Pro’s biggest issue is that the hardware gets in the way of the outside world. Maybe in another 3 to 5 years, the designs will be significantly smaller and less Borg assimilation-like, so it is truly augmentative to feeling connected to the real world? Even Apple’s own marketing material shows Vision Pro owners as outsiders with the majority of people they interact with not having a Vision Pro. They have yet to make it feel so right and so natural like the iPhone did. My current position is, not now, but hopefully they make it make perfect sense in a pick-up-and-go way for everyday life.