OutdoorAppDeveloper

For reference, the PS5 SSD runs at 44 gigabits per second. This already exists in a real consumer device. Next year there will be third party drives at reasonable prices (they do exist today in the pro market). So these new drives will have to run at reduced speeds over the USB 4 standard that has not even been officially released yet. Still major kudos to Apple's hardware team for supporting USB 4 ahead of Intel and AMD. They really are firing on all cylinders.

I am an indie dev and I am not delighted. 30% was perfectly reasonable. What I want is full access to the iPhone via SDKs and far less restrictions on the features I can provide to my customers. I am tired of Apple standing on the neck of the entire computer industry. With all their talk of "think different" and examples of radical thinkers, in reality Apple wants none of that in their ecosystem. Dare to create anything Apple does not like and you will be banned. Home automation would have happened by now if Apple had provided a real WiFi SDK and not insisted that developers use the craptastic HomeKit SDK with its high fees for hardware makers.

I have trouble reading charts that don't have scales on them. It would be super if Apple included some Geekbench results or other actual benchmarks when they say how much faster their computers are.
What are your thoughts on the 16 GB RAM limitation? Do you think future M series chips will have similar restrictions? I am guessing not on the iMac M2 next year.
The M1 appears to be a compromise of a CPU. It has fewer thermal limitations than the A series processors. It keeps the performance/power advantages of the A series but is aimed at the desktop resulting in rather impressive specs even if it is not exactly at the enthusiast level.
The GPU should be faster than other embedded GPUs but I suspect is at least five times slower than a discrete GPU. Hopefully the M2 will also allow for discrete GPUs but I somehow suspect that it will remain embedded which raises the specter that the 2021 iMac could have slower graphics than the 2020 iMac. If Apple opts for an optional discrete GPU do you think we will see an Apple branded discrete GPU (the G1?) or will they use the latest AMD GPU?
As a developer, I see the change from Intel to ARM as only positive news. Compiling code for the different platforms is just a small change to the project settings. It may have implications if I want backwards compatibility with older versions of the OS (a Catalina compatible version won't run on the M1 for example). There is dead silence from Parallels about Windows compatibility which is sad because Apple could have made Rosetta a SDK available to all developers. Major missed opportunity there.
I am still holding out hope that Apple will announce a Mac nano at the same time they announce the next Apple TV. If they did this at the same time the M2 is announced, they could still hit a $299 price point with an 8GB M1 processor for the Mac nano and Apple TV. Trust me, this would create major waves in the PC industry as they have absolutely nothing in that price/performance range. If Apple waits past next year to do it, they will have lost their opportunity because you know Microsoft has to be preparing their own Windows 10 for ARM based computers with Rosetta like backwards compatibility.

There are two really big announcements that Apple will have to make in the next year that will shape the future of both Apple and the entire computer industry:
1. A desktop scale CPU. Thus far all of the CPUs Apple has made have been targeted at mobile devices. They are limited by the power they use and the heat they generate. A desktop scale CPU can draw 100 watts or more (280 for a Threadripper). How will these CPUs compare with ones from Intel and AMD given that Apple's current mobile processors compete well with Intel's laptop processors?
2. A discrete GPU. Apple's current GPUs are built into the processor. They are great for playing games on mobile devices but they are at least ten times slower than current discrete GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA. For ray tracing they are about a hundred times slower than the hardware based ray tracing in the current crop of GPUs. Will Apple integrate AMD GPUs into the Apple Silicon iMac or will they announce their own discrete GPU?

A crush of preorders for the HomePod mini? Somehow I doubt that. I bet if you left a pallet load of them in front of an Apple Store and came back an hour later, most of them would still be there.