But as often is the case with Apple releases, you DO indeed have to sacrifice things. Apple will often use marketing to tell people they don't need features that are standard on other platforms (copy/paste, MMS on the iPhone, more than 8 Gigs of memory on the first M1). So it's hard to call it a lateral move without sacrifice. Granted, Apple always comes around.
The lateral move was with Macs, not iPhones, which were always ARM. And the 2020 M1 Mac mini had two memory configurations, 8GB or 16GB. Obviously the product would not appeal to users that require 64GB of memory, yet most M1 users report the limited RAM doesn't affect performance. The only sacrifice with switching from Intel that I can think of is no longer being able to run x86 VMs at full speed. It's not like there are sweeping sacrifices everywhere, but instead a nitpick or two.
