> I dunno. The M1 is a great mobile chip. But high performance is not what you should expect from a mobile chip. You can hope for high performance (for a mobile chip).
I think this sentence automatically counts you out of the target for this marketing. Most people don't even know what a "mobile chip" is, except maybe something you find in phone. They certainly won't be looking at the M1 and thinking "mobile chip".
You not being in target for the marketing also explains why you find the "Performance vs. power" graph confusing. Again most people don't know what a "Wintel" even is, never mind 14nm++ (is a big number or a small number?). "latest laptop PC chip?" is perfect, exactly because most people have no idea what the latest laptop PC chip is. What they will know is how fast their current laptop "feels", how new it is, and can then extrapolate how fast they think a "latest chip" should be. By extension, they can figure out what Apple is trying to tell them.
> Duh. I don't understand it, and I know someone who doesn't focus on hardware won't understand it either.
Well I know a few people who don't focus on hardware. When talking to them about the new MacBooks they definitely had an idea of how fast a new computer might run, or at least they new it was faster than their current computer. That all you need to understand Apple's graph.
> There are other much less confusing charts showing relative performance of the M1 in laptop benchmarks that reflect realistic workloads
Again depends on your audience. Most people don't really know what a benchmark is (or even workloads) never mind how to interpret them. As someone who in theory know about benchmarks etc, even I struggle to interpret the graphs and it always takes several minutes to get to grips with the data. Even at that point, the only conclusion I come away with is that thing A is 2x faster than thing B. Which is exactly what Apple's graphs show, but without me needing to do mental gymnastics.
> The ML slide he's writing about undermines what he's talking about in terms of clarity and 'talking like a human.' It is just gibberish, equivalent to Star Trek nonsense about dilithium crystals transfobulating the warp core. All it means is "has the same features that have been standard for a decade or more on every operating system except a little better, working on more cores than before."
I don't ML slide is targeted at the general population. Rather it's for people who know a little bit about tech, have heard about this ML magic, maybe read a couple of articles, and the blurb helps them feel a bit smart because they can understand it, then explain it to their less techy friends.
> This is not Apple's best marketing work, but it is their best actual laptop product in a while: go figure.
The laptops are selling like hot cakes. Clearly the marketing works. There's an almost infinite supply of examples showing that building something good just isn't enough for it to sell. You actually need to market it properly. The evidence show that Apple have nailed it for the new Macs.