Soo we can't demand both stability and constant reinvention

For those of us immersed in hardware fandom, the cycle is neither new or disappointing - if anything, a lot of us relish the “boring” times, because it means we can finally squeeze performance out of our investment without fretting about arbitrary replacement timelines or major improvements in technology leading to gargantuan gains. It’s nice, quiet, and let’s us enjoy the fruits of our labors and hobbies.

That being said, I do kind of head-tilt at the folks screaming that this sort of “boring” cycle of hardware isn’t sustainable, that somehow, someone must create the next major improvement to justify all new spend or otherwise this is a worthless exercise. In reality, it’s always been the opposite: Moore’s Law wasn’t infinitely scalable, and anyone who suffered through the Pentium 4 era was painfully aware of its limitations. Sure, we can find other areas to scale (like going from clock speed to core counts, and core counts to core types), but Moore’s Law is not infallible or infinite; eventually, a plateau will be reached that cannot be overcome without serious R&D or a fundamental sea-change in the marketplace (like moving from x86 to ARM), often a combination of both.

Apple, at least, has the unenviable position of being among the first in addressing this challenge: how do you sell more products when power or efficiency gains are increasingly thin, year over year? Their approach has been to leverage services for recurring revenue and gradually slowing down product refreshes over time, while tempering expectations of massive gains for those product lines seeing yearly refreshes. I suspect that will be the norm for a lot of companies going forward, hence the drive to close walled gardens everywhere and lock-in customers (see also the Android sideloading discourse).

The hardware cycle at present is fairly boring, and I quite like it. My M1 iPad Pro and M1 Pro Macbook Pro dutifully serve me well, and I have no need to replace either until they break.

I just want the old Macbook Air M1 design back :(

What happened to the M3 GPU to give it a drop in score?

Agree! very happy with the M4 performance.

Reading this on my brand new M5 Mac :)

This seems like a straw man. Are reviewers really calling the M5 boring?

We want Apple to compete. When they stopped signing CUDA drivers, I thought it was because Apple had a competitive GPGPU solution that wasn't SPIR-V in a trenchcoat. Here we are 10 years later with SPIR-V in a trenchcoat. The lack of vision is pathetic and has undoubtedly cost Apple trillions in the past half-decade alone.

If you think this is a boring architecture, more power to you. It's not boring enough for me.

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