curtis hannah

Considering the new pricing tiers, this makes perfect sense to finally have a replacement to the base model.

Too bad it means the 2015 models probably only have 2 years of software support left.

Well yeah when it became closer to launch, it was clear it was taking cues from the new MacBook Pros. The notch, Magsafe, and M2 became clear enough. It just mattered what the M2 would exactly be.

It's been long rumored Apple was considering making more power focused performance features on Macs, and given where the M series potential is it will be the perfect opportunity.
Assuming there will be no more dedicated graphics cards options moving forward, this will probably be replacing "automatic graphics switching" on current Macs, and rather a feature that has all cores on the M series chip active while it is active, instead of temporary jumps when the high performance cores turn on.

An irony that is not being mentioned alot is Apple said they only wanted lightning to last 10 years. That comes up next year, and most iPads have already moved onto USB-C. Sure it's possible they'll try to force wireless charging on iPhones, but every Apple device with a lightning port will need to switch soon anyways, and USB C makes more sense on a number of them.

Is this a surprise, it's clear even an iPad Pro could probably beat a similarly priced Windows device, ARM or x86, add onto the fact the M1 is at least twice the performance, and Apples built up true emulation and native support better than Windows has at this point on ARM, and this will be consistent for years until Microsoft starts believing ARM processors are the future.