The Independent:

The company’s representatives kept stressing that fact throughout the announcement of the M1 and the three new computers that have it inside: they love the Mac, and they love these Macs. Soon after that event finished, some of Apple’s most senior executives – marketing chief Greg ‘Joz’ Joswiak, software boss Craig Federighi, hardware engineering leader John Ternus – spoke with The Independent to explain exactly why.

And:

Usually, a major advance in computing performance might add 20 or 30 per cent faster processing speed – but the new computers multiply that number by 10, with numbers showing that the computers as much as three times more powerful generally and up to 11 times faster at some tasks.

Apple is getting a lot of pushback on their claims, but see for yourself. Here’s my rollup of the single and multi-core Geekbench scores. The single core benchmark hovers at around 1700 (higher number is more powerful). For comparison, the latest Intel MacBook Pro lands a single core benchmark at about 1100.

Multicore score for the 2020 Intel-i5-based MacBook Air lands at around 2500. The M1 multicore around 7000. Jump over to the Geekbench browser and see for yourself. Look at the VirtualApple scores to see emulation scores, check out the GPU scores, too. Don’t take Apple’s word for it.

Even when he got his hands on the new computers, Joz says he “couldn’t believe it”.

“We overshot,” says Federighi. “You have these projects where, sometimes you have a goal and you’re like, ‘well, we got close, that was fine’.

“This one, part of what has us all just bouncing off the walls here – just smiling – is that as we brought the pieces together, we’re like, ‘this is working better than we even thought it would’.

“We started getting back our battery life numbers, and we’re like, ‘You’re kidding. I thought we had people that knew how to estimate these things’.”

This is a fun read. Nice to really love your job.