As a developer, I honestly don't care if my CPU has 2 cores or 20 cores as long as it gets the workload done quickly.
In the real world, I only care about how it performs and how much it costs. The implementation details are interesting, but they don't matter when I'm trying to get work done as fast as possible.
The M1 comes in at a great price point for what it is and it's obviously your only option if you want to run macOS (hackintosh isn't an option for production use). Good to have options.
> I only care about how it performs and how much it costs.
> I honestly don't care if my CPU has 2 cores or 20 cores
So first means: "my only concerns are performance and cost". What determines performance and cost? Primary answer: number of cores. If you care about performance, you care if the CPU has 2 or 20 cores. If you care about cost, you care if the CPU has 2 or 20 cores. You might not articulate your concerns in this way, but they are intimately bound together.
If you only care about "good enough" performance and "in my range" cost, then your concerns are still bound up with core count.
So what's your apparently more correct understanding of some of those words?
> So what's your apparently more correct understanding of some of those words?
My guess would be "I care about results, not how you get them". Which is a completely acceptable policy if your workloads line up exactly with the benchmarks.
The benefit of trying to "peek behind the curtain" is mostly for trying to extrapolate anything else from the benchmark results (how would it perform on my different workload? which setups are worth benchmarking anyway? what could I change to improve the performance?).
Correlations don't make it wrong to say "I only care about X, not correlated thing Y." Don't try to impress them with stats about cores, because cores can vary enough to make those numbers meaningless in a vacuum. You need to put them in the proper context, which... gives you performance and cost numbers.
In the real world, I only care about how it performs and how much it costs. The implementation details are interesting, but they don't matter when I'm trying to get work done as fast as possible.
The M1 comes in at a great price point for what it is and it's obviously your only option if you want to run macOS (hackintosh isn't an option for production use). Good to have options.