A few days ago I noted that I use a lot of Apple devices because of their hardware excellence. CPUs, top-quality screens and speakers and batteries, even storage systems are just class leaders. And performance on Apple devices is seemingly effortless, where my entire history with competitors is that it was basically just a boast, especially in mobile form where if you actually use the capabilities you’ll have blasting fans and a 30-minute battery life.
I’m looking forward to competitors legitimately catching up and giving us options. So when I saw a huge wave of hype-pieces for Intel’s new Panther Lake class of processor, it caught my attention. Pieces with titles like “Intel’s M1 Moment is Finally Here”.
What almost none of these reviewers disclosed, however, is that Intel did a whole press junket where they flew all of these guys out to Intel’s Arizona fab for a whole dog and pony show, wined and dined them, and basically ensured that they would write fawning pieces. Whatever claims any of these people make about how this doesn’t coerce them is delusional nonsense. It instantly puts a shroud over any sense of credibility.
This junket thing is a very old strategy that is massively corrupting, and it is done specifically because it’s an easy way to buy off foolish people who will declare how it totally doesn’t influence them at all and their words are all their own and…
Anyway, it’s an interesting processor. Still uncompetitive single-core speeds, but it makes it up in cores while still being surprisingly power efficient, and it features a very decent GPU.
Some of the makers of laptops with this chip have stepped back from the dodgy “stick a bunch of stickers all over the laptop” garbage they’ve traditionally done as they target the Apple market. Most reviews comment on this (remember the junket, where they were fed narratives), vendors amazingly realizing that sticking of a bunch of ridiculous looking stickers all over a device is not wanted. Probably still going to stuff a bunch of crapware in the OS, though.
I will check it out. Give me a durable, robust laptop featuring this processor at a price that reflects that it still isn’t Apple Silicon tier and it’ll do numbers.