Comment by OKRainbowKid
Comment by OKRainbowKid 6 days ago
You are correct, the situation is similar for most mobile processors. They are unavailable on the market for consumers looking to build a system.
Apple goes one step further though: M processors aren't just unavailable to consumers, there's also no way for OEMs to build systems using these chips. In this point they differ significantly from the examples you mentioned. For people that do not want to buy into the Apple ecosystem, M chips are effectively not on the market, and benchmark comparisons to desktop or server CPUs are meaningless.
Why does it matter that they aren't available to OEMs? This is moving the goalpost from your original argument.
The second part of your argument is currently correct but that will change shortly. There is no reason to lock into the apple ecosystem. M4 support is underway in Linux though not yet available. You can easily use a Mac mini as a server running Linux.