Yeah, I noticed that too.
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Who the heck is Patrick Moorhead and according to whom is he a no.1 rated analyst?
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Forbes? I don’t know.
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Please don’t feed the clickbait.
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I wasn’t completely sure if the unpopular article was made for clicks or not.
He’s #1 rated by the firm he founded and runs.
This reads like a poorly-done hit piece. I can’t help but think he got a dud unit or he’s done something wrong with it.
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Forbes has a history of anti-Apple pieces, and poorly sourced ones at that. As @tjluoma correctly labeled it, this is clickbait.
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Clickbait? Perhaps. But more importantly it’s just one persons analysis and opinion in a sea of opinions. And you know what they say about opinions… 
We see this on just about all consumer goods, like cameras, cars, clothing, etc. For me, I just add it to the others out there and analyze them against the backdrop of my own needs and goals to make my own decisions. All of us here of a diverse array of opinions on the gear we choose and use as well. To me, some of those opinions are more relevant than others. The choice is figuring out which is which.
I’ve never heard of Patrick Moorhead, and as far as I’m concerned he’s doing and running stuff I don’t use on my gear, so his opinion is of little value to me. Like I said, one opinion in a sea of them…
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I think he makes some good points. Most notably, user satisfaction may depend on what you use the computer for. I do not think it is unreasonable for him to point out that there may be incompatibilities with some software and this may particularly create support challenges in an enterprise. If I ran some company providing internal support to hundreds or thousands of employees, I would not want to add the M1 as an “approved” computer just yet until we have a better handle on its capabilities.
The battery life comments are notable, especially as just this week Apple was fined over $100 million for its iPhone batterygate issues. Surely it would not be beyond Apple to exaggerate battery life or at least to portray it in the best possible life.
I believe this is the site he refers to regarding software compatibility. No doubt most major software application issues will be resolved soon. But if you regularly use your mac with niche or custom or legacy software, maybe M1 will not be for you.
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It would be great if a few of you guys could reply to this guy and chip in what you’ve already said in this topic. (the article that he is referring to is the Forbes article).
There is a part of that article I think is dishonest, which is the battery life claim. Any workload that would burn the battery in 4.5 hours would have killed an Intel Mac in like 90 minutes. The point is the improvement, not the absolute hours regardless of energy use of the open apps.
I thought the most legitimate point was software compatibility, although it doesn’t seem right to say the Rosetta 2 situation is the same as Rosetta 1, performance-wise.
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Then I’d be running Windows. 
Incompatible software? Happens with many OS updates. And stating “may be incompatibilities”. Yes, they may. But it seems almost everything is running, at least rosettaed. And most enterprise products are moving to SAAS/browser.
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Without any crashes?
To be fair though, “batterygate” wasn’t really “exaggerate[ing] battery life”. That was them preemptively throttling the performance of the phone to prevent crashes when the phone tried to draw too much power from a (presumably) aging battery that couldn’t supply it.
The issue there was that many people thought they were intentionally trying to push people into a new phone by ruining the performance of their old phone via software.
I don’t think there are any analogies to the performance claims of an M1 Mac, other than the fact that you should always take marketing claims with at least a little bit of salt. 
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$123 Million fine seems like a pretty major issue to me - not likely that would be the outcome of a company “just trying to help”
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Before you draw any factual conclusion based on a settlement, you need to think about the value to the company of having the dispute be over and the resources they have available. In this case, those items can be characterized as “extremely high” and “(proverbially) more than God” respectively. So be careful what you assume.
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I found another article that criticizes the M1 chip, but it piggybacks off of Patrick Moorhead from the Forbes article.
I never said they were “just trying to help”. I can leave open the possibility that they might’ve been throttling the phones because they thought the crashes would damage their reputation, and thought that throttling would be the better option.
But in that scenario, there’s a reason. Whatever you believe, they had a good reason from a business point of view to do the throttling.
What would be the reason to lie about battery capacity? Any increased capacity is a huge PR win, and the people who have the Macbooks so far are definitely reporting dramatically increased battery life.
So (a) I don’t find it hard to believe at all that they had an internal test that yielded the numbers they gave in the presentation, and (b) I can’t believe that they’d fudge numbers that were already higher than people would expect to be even higher if it would become obvious that they were lying.
All downside there, no upside.
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Plenty of reputable folks have confirmed that the M1 powered laptops have massively better battery life than their Intel predecessors.
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Can personally confirm. Started the day out with 77% at 8 am, had 23% when I left the lab at 5:25P. Spent about 6 hours on reading and writing projects, primarily using the M1, about another hour doing admin and playing music or podcasts during the entire day.
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