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I don't know about the M1, to be honest, but I used to be an Apple customer and ardent fanboy (so embarrassing!) during the golden PPC age and remember very well Apple's inflated claims about performance, which all turned out to be false the minute they switched to Intel. So I agree with your comment, it's advisable to always take miraculous performance claims with a grain of salt.

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Were the performance claims false, or did Intel just catch up, while PowerPC stagnated?

They were misleading to false, depending on how you interpret it. The claims were true for certain specialized microbenchmarks and false in general. PPC programs running tasks that could be optimized for using Altivec instructions could be much faster than on comparable Intel chips, but those tasks were rare and normal programs were slower than on Intel.

Apple themselves changed their tune about the difference almost overnight.

Surely, with the M1s having been actually publicly available for many months now, there's enough data and benchmarks out there that we don't need to take Apple's performance claims with any salt?

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