Which is actually incredible when you think about it. They might not know or care about what "M1" is (although I doubt that), but it's clearly a commercial success.
Great stat. I might be underselling the achievement... I bet some of that growth is driven by the insane battery life, which we know people care a lot about. To be clear, I own and love 2 M1-based machines :-)
I stand by my overall comment, though: They are better Macs. Not a new category or a new product for Apple.
They are powerful ARM laptops. I'm considering getting one purely because of that + Asahi Linux. My Pinebook Pro just doesn't cut it as a main machine, and I'm sick of x86.
I stick to free software whenever possible, so I wouldn't seriously consider using macOS. I even run Guix System (one of the FSF-approved distros) on my current main machine (ThinkPad T440p).
This figure is useless without context. What was this number for previous generations? I suspect it's always super high because a huge demographic for mac's is college students buying their first laptop, obviously it's gonna be their first Mac. Same with software devs. Tons of Macs are used by software devs getting their work computer.
Which is actually incredible when you think about it. They might not know or care about what "M1" is (although I doubt that), but it's clearly a commercial success.