In this case it's more fair since the last iMac did indeed have an M1.

EDIT: This is wrong: apparently there was a M3 refresh that went under the radar, including mine: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/10/apple-supercharges-24...

TIL it went that long without a refresh.

I actually think it makes sense to advertise this way.

Most people I know who bought an M1 (myself included) are still rocking the M1.

People who’ve purchased M2/M3 machines are less likely to be jumping on an M4.

Comparing to an M1 tells the most likely customer exactly what they need to know.

Exactly this. It cuts through the noise and frames the benefit for the people who are most likely to upgrade.

The nerds will find the relevant information anyway so no need to cater the high level marketing to them.

>Now 4 generations in, they are still comparing performance to M1. I get that 15-20% improvements aren't too exciting but it feels old.

FTA: "Compared to the most popular 24-inch all-in-one PC with the latest Intel Core 7 processor, the new iMac is up to 4.5x faster.1"

First off, "up to" is the most bullshit metric. I am also up to 10x more productive when I get coffee, but that's when comparing to days where I just play Satisfactory all day long.

Secondly, "compared to a random HP AIO PC with a 5 year old CPU" (since there are approximately zero chances that the most popular PC in a market that is heavily Apple dominated would be a 2023 Raptor Lake) is just, once again, Apple's piss poor comparisons.

Nah, it's a Core 7 150U, which is Raptor Lake.

The trick is they used a GPU accelerated benchmark (Affinity) that highlights how trash the Intel GPU is.

Yes that's because they don't price match. If they would, the Apple computer would still some better things about it but it wouldn't win a lot of benchmarks, if any...

_No-one_ buying this is upgrading from an M3. Honestly, most people buying this would be upgrading from some sort of elderly Intel thing; these tend to have long operating lifetimes.

Probably because most iMac owners are still on M1.

They're trying to get current M1 users to upgrade.

I know it's not the same, but it's like Intel saying the Pentium IV is however many times faster than then Pentium MMX

If they compared against the M3, people would be complaining that apple encourages needless frequent upgrades.

And even with that they're still only boasting of < 2.0x speedups...