>But yeah the "Apple M hardware is miles and leagues away" hypetrain was just a hypetrain. Impressive and genuinely great but not revolutionary, at best incremental.
Compared to the incremental changes we've seen the previous 10 years before it arrived on AMD/Intel space, it was revolutionary.
Was Intel switching from the Pentium 4 to the Core architecture considered revolutionary at the time? Was AMD's bulldozer architecture? I don't recall.
We must have different definitions of the word "revolutionary". They put a high-end mobile chip in a laptop and it came out good, what's revolutionary? The UMA architecture has advantages but hardly revolutionary.
The jump in performance, efficiency, battery time was not incremental or "evolutionary". Such jumps we call evolutionary.
What they did doesn't matter. Even if they merely took an intel laptop chip and stuck a chewing gum on it, the result was evolutionary.
So much so, that it put a fire under Intel's ass, and mobilized the whole industry to compete. For years after it came out the goal was to copy it and beat it.
What did you expect to call "revolutionary"? Some novel architecture that uses ternary logic? Quantum chips?
Compared to the incremental changes we've seen the previous 10 years before it arrived on AMD/Intel space, it was revolutionary.