I dont know if you’ve actually done the numbers.. but most laptops on the market, have low to mediocre specs. It would surprise me if more than 2% are pro/enthusiast.
Apple didn't specify if they're counting by model or total sales, but virtually everything in the Gamer Laptop category is going to be faster in virtually every measure.
As a Joe Schmoe it's hard to get good figures, but it appears the total laptop market is about $161.952B[1] with the "gaming" laptop segment selling about $10.96B[2]. Since gaming laptops are more expensive this undercounts cheap laptops, but there are other classes of laptop that are going to outperform this mac, like business workstations.
There might be one way to massage the numbers to pull out that statistic somehow, but it is at best misleading.
>Apple didn't specify if they're counting by model or total sales,
If it was Model they would be spinning it. But they said sold in the past year. I dont know how anyone else would interpret it, but in financial and analytics that is very clearly implying unit sold.
Your [1] is Laptop with Tablet, total Laptop market is about $100B, although this year we might see a sharp increase cause of pandemic.
Let say there are $10 Gaming Laptop market. So 10% of Market Value are going to Gaming Laptop. Total Laptop Market includes Chromebook, so if you do ASP averaging I would expect at least 3x ( if not 4x or higher ) difference in Gaming and Rest of Laptop Market. So your hypothesis of "All Gaming Laptop" would be faster than M1 gives you roughly 3.3% of the Marketshare. Not too far off 2%.
And all of that is before we put any performance number into comparison.
On the fact that discrete gaming laptops have higher power requirements and better cooling solutions, in turn allowing much faster CPUs to run in them.
That's the most meaningful constraint for mobile CPUs today, after all.
If you're not going to compare Apples to Apples, i.e. if power, cooling and size is a constraint you're not going to care about at all, you might as well count desktop PCs as well.
Apples measurement comes pretty close to comparing "laptops that most people would actually buy". Not sure why it's meaningful that a laptop maker can put out a model that's as thick as a college book, has the very top bins of all parts, sounds like a jet engine when running at max speed, and is purchased by 1% of the most avid gamers.
Oh, and if someone puts out a second model that adds RGB backlit keyboard, but is otherwise equivalent, that should somehow count against Apples achievements, because for some reason counting by number of models is meaningful regardless of how many copies that model sold o_O
So no data except a view that more power and more cooling automatically leads to better performance independent of process, architecture and any other factors?
> Apple didn't specify if they're counting by model or total sales, but virtually everything in the Gamer Laptop category is going to be faster in virtually every measure.
This is what I don't get.. why would you ever assume they meant counting by model? That's a nearly meaningless measurement. How do you even distinguish between models in that measurement? Where do you set the thresholds? The supercharged gaming laptops are absolutely going to dominate that statistics no matter what, because there's a huge number of models, lots of which only differ mostly by cosmetic changes. The margins are likely higher, so they don't need to sell as many of a given model to make it worthwhile to put one out. Does a laptop maker even have to actually sell a single model for it to count? How many do they have to sell for it to count? Does it make sense to count models where every part is picked from the best performing bins, so that you're guaranteed that the model couldn't count for more than a fraction of sales?
Counting by number of laptops actually sold is the only meaningful measurement, at least you have a decent chance of finding an objective way to measure that.
And I thought it was 100% obvious from Apples marketing material what they meant, so I really don't get why anyone is confused about this.
> Apple didn't specify if they're counting by model or total sales, but virtually everything in the Gamer Laptop category is going to be faster in virtually every measure.
Not a single one will beat it in single core performance.
I suspect they're not technically saying that, since they're saying "PC laptops." But as Coldtea notes, it's pretty clear the M1-based laptops embarrass all current Intel-based Mac laptops. I'm just not going to fault Apple too much for failing to explicitly say "so this $999 MacBook Air just smokes our $2800 MacBook Pro."
