For better or worse if you make a (high end) consumer CPU it will be judged against the M-series, just like if you make a high end phone it will be judged against the iPhone.
All he is saying: We currently have products in a similar product category (arm based desktop computers) that are widely used and have known benchmark scores (and general reviews) and it would make sense if I publish a new cpu for the same product category ("Reaching Desktop Performance" implies that) that I'd compare it to the known alternatives.
In the end you can just run Asahi on your macbook, the OS is not that relevant here. A comparison to macbooks running Asahi Linux would be fine.
amelius, if anyone had specific requirements, it was you with your "systems for in-flight entertainment".
OP asked a very reasonable question for a very generic comparison to the 800-pound gorilla in the consumer CPU world in general, and ARM CPU world in particular.
If the article can reference AMD's Zen 5 cores and Intel's Lion/Sunny Cove, they could have made at least a brief reference to M-series CPUs. As a reader and potential buyer of any of them, I find it would have been a very useful comparison.
This is not possible with Apple parts.
That's what my example was about. It was only specific because I wanted to have a concrete example.
Talk about specifics, eh? Didn't you just argue against an article addressing "_their_" specific usecase?
In a store people will ask "is this better than an Apple?".
And I'll tell you one more thing, when I was in the industry and taking computing parts to build products with them I did not form an opinion by reading internet reviews. I haven't met anyone who did.