>I'm kind of wondering how scalable the performance increases they made here are
It's a good question and really only time will tell, but this same comment was made about these chips in the iPhone: "impressive yes, but would they be able to scale up to power a laptop?" A lot of people said no back then, and yet here we are.
Apple's not stupid and they're not going to slap Intel in the face like this if they're not 100% sure they won't need them again in the future. I'd be willing to bet they already know the answer to these questions (and likely even have 32/64GB M1s running in their labs). There's just no way they'd go into something like this blindly.
I thought I was pretty clear that I fully expect Apple will be able to migrate their entire line.
My only question is whether they will blow the doors off Intel/ AMD the way they did with the M1. With the MacBook Air (and largely with the base MacBook Pro), Apple was able to more than double the processor speed even while increasing processor speed. I'm not convinced we'll see that kind of explosive speed improvements with the 16" MacBook Pro. Battery life will almost certainly trash the current MBP. I'm just not confident we'll see the base 16" MacBook doubling its CPU performance.
FWIW, I don't see anything Apple has done as a slap in the face. They've been pretty reasonable about not mentioning Intel in their performance numbers. Instead all metrics are based on the performance of previous generation MacBook Air.
I would be stunned if Apple outsourced any part of their CPU/ GPU design. About the closest I could see to that would be offering discrete graphics on some of their top end models.
It's a good question and really only time will tell, but this same comment was made about these chips in the iPhone: "impressive yes, but would they be able to scale up to power a laptop?" A lot of people said no back then, and yet here we are.
Apple's not stupid and they're not going to slap Intel in the face like this if they're not 100% sure they won't need them again in the future. I'd be willing to bet they already know the answer to these questions (and likely even have 32/64GB M1s running in their labs). There's just no way they'd go into something like this blindly.