I’m looking for an app where I can (legally) download YouTube videos to watch offline/without WiFi or whatever. Are there any apps that can do that or should I just suck it up and get YouTube Premium?

Is there a app to directly download youtube videos? Is that a thing for iphones? Trying to find a simple way to download youtube videos. Is that a thing for iPhones? If so what apps do everyone use?

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/searchbar?selectedSearchType=hitgroups&searchWords=Stephen+Wheeler&minReward=0.00&x=0&y=0 don't need to do it on you're phone, just be the owner of one.

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/searchbar?selectedSearchType=hitgroups&requesterId=A3TYG5OEQR1ZHI

I've been trying to look on the App Store but all the apps I'm finding are falsely advertised and don't work. Any good apps to recommend? Thanks!!'

Basically I'm looking for an app which allows me to download a youtube video, then lets me play it back at a latter time. And the downloaded videos are the high quality ones
This is useful when I transit from an area with wifi to an area without, and then I dont have to constantly wait for it to buffer.

WINNER HERE: https://www.reddit.com/apple/comments/jw40ai/hey_apollo_for_reddit_app_guy_here_back_with_the/
[GIVEAWAY ENTRY HAS NOW CONCLUDED. I'm in class now but will draw the winner tonight and post the results, stay tuned!]
[PART 3 is here, since we hit the comment cap on this thread: https://reddit.com/apolloapp/comments/jv6f78/part_3_im_giving_away_an_iphone_12_promaxmini_to/]
Hey,
I'm the guy who builds Apollo for Reddit, an alternative iPhone app for Reddit that people on Apple have been really kind to in loving. I had a lot of fun working on the iOS 14 update with a ton of cool, customizable home screen Widgets, Picture in Picture video, and a bunch of other Reddit meets iOS 14 goodness, and now that all the new iPhones are out I wanted to celebrate it with a giveaway. (Who said those YouTubers get to have all the fun?)
I did this giveaway last year for iOS 13 if some of you remember and everyone seemed to have a great time, so I figured making it an annual thing could be fun. (Proof of winner) Plus the people who use Apollo are all super nice and give me awesome suggestions all the time for making it even better so consider it a thank you as well.

What Do I Win?

The winner gets their choice of any iPhone 12 model (Pro or non Pro, Max, normal sized or Mini) in any color and 128 GB capacity. Are you a BLUE person? RED? GOLD?! When this post is 24 hours old, at 11 PM GMT (countdown), I'll post in ApolloApp who the winner is, I'll also DM you for details and people will probably spam you as well.

Rules

Simply check out this thread and comment and you're entered! Don't spam jibberish though please, and no multiple comments. If you're looking for an idea for a comment, tell me your favorite iPhone model of all time, or the first third party app you remember downloading. Account must have been created at the time of this post to prevent creating accounts just to enter. You do not have to download Apollo to enter, but it may give you extra luck who knows.

Apollo? iOS 14 update?

Apollo is an alternative Reddit app for iOS with a focus on clean design and feeling right at home on iOS with a native design and adopting all the best, newest features, like Widgets, Picture in Picture video, super fast media viewer, and more. I started building it after finishing working at Apple in 2015 and have been working on it full time since. It's free to download and has over 100,000 five-star reviews, so you should really check it out! It's built solely by me, and I built it closely with community input to craft the best Reddit experience out there.
Even if you're used to the official app, I think you'll really like the improvements Apollo offers to your browsing experience, even if it just prevents you from getting Rick Roll'd.

Do you have any pets?

Yeah I have two cats named Hugo and Ruby. They're great, I also get to pet my neighbor's dog Leonard sometimes who is really cute. Sorry I don't have a picture of him but picture a big black shaggy dog.

Thank You!

Seriously, have some fun and best of luck! My whole job exists thanks to the kindness of this subreddit and community, so thank you and I'll do my best to continue to impress you with some more sick updates. :)
- Christian
[PART 3 is here, since we hit the comment cap on this thread: https://reddit.com/apolloapp/comments/jv6f78/part_3_im_giving_away_an_iphone_12_promaxmini_to/]

WINNER HERE: https://www.reddit.com/apple/comments/jw40ai/hey_apollo_for_reddit_app_guy_here_back_with_the/
[PART 3 is here, since we hit the comment cap on this thread: https://reddit.com/apolloapp/comments/jv6f78/part_3_im_giving_away_an_iphone_12_promaxmini_to/]
Hey,
I'm the guy who builds Apollo for Reddit, an alternative iPhone app for Reddit that people on Apple have been really kind to in loving. I had a lot of fun working on the iOS 14 update with a ton of cool, customizable home screen Widgets, Picture in Picture video, and a bunch of other Reddit meets iOS 14 goodness, and now that all the new iPhones are out I wanted to celebrate it with a giveaway. (Who said those YouTubers get to have all the fun?)
I did this giveaway last year for iOS 13 if some of you remember and everyone seemed to have a great time, so I figured making it an annual thing could be fun. (Proof of winner) Plus the people who use Apollo are all super nice and give me awesome suggestions all the time for making it even better so consider it a thank you as well.

What Do I Win?

The winner gets their choice of any iPhone 12 model (Pro or non Pro, Max, normal sized or Mini) in any color and 128 GB capacity. Are you a BLUE person? RED? GOLD?! When this post is 24 hours old, at 11 PM GMT (countdown), I'll post in ApolloApp who the winner is, I'll also DM you for details and people will probably spam you as well.

Rules

Simply check out this thread and comment and you're entered! Don't spam jibberish though please, and no multiple comments. If you're looking for an idea for a comment, tell me your favorite iPhone model of all time, or the first third party app you remember downloading. Account must have been created at the time of this post to prevent creating accounts just to enter. You do not have to download Apollo to enter, but it may give you extra luck who knows.

Apollo? iOS 14 update?

Apollo is an alternative Reddit app for iOS with a focus on clean design and feeling right at home on iOS with a native design and adopting all the best, newest features, like Widgets, Picture in Picture video, super fast media viewer, and more. I started building it after finishing working at Apple in 2015 and have been working on it full time since. It's free to download and has over 100,000 five-star reviews, so you should really check it out! It's built solely by me, and I built it closely with community input to craft the best Reddit experience out there.
Even if you're used to the official app, I think you'll really like the improvements Apollo offers to your browsing experience, even if it just prevents you from getting Rick Roll'd.

Do you have any pets?

Yeah I have two cats named Hugo and Ruby. They're great, I also get to pet my neighbor's dog Leonard sometimes who is really cute. Sorry I don't have a picture of him but picture a big black shaggy dog.

Thank You!

Seriously, have some fun and best of luck! My whole job exists thanks to the kindness of this subreddit and community, so thank you and I'll do my best to continue to impress you with some more sick updates. :)
- Christian
[PART 3 is here, since we hit the comment cap on this thread: https://reddit.com/apolloapp/comments/jv6f78/part_3_im_giving_away_an_iphone_12_promaxmini_to/]

WINNER ANNOUNCED: https://www.reddit.com/apple/comments/jw40ai/hey_apollo_for_reddit_app_guy_here_back_with_the/
Hmm doesn't look like the third giveaway thread has been indexed by the PushShift API (basically a Reddit research API that makes bulk analysis easier) yet which is required for my script, so I'm just gonna try again in the morning (the other 2 have been at least).
[GIVEAWAY ENTRY HAS NOW CONCLUDED. I'm in class now but will draw the winner tonight and post the results, stay tuned!]
[Here's thread 3 (THREE!), we blew past that silly Reddit comments per thread limit]
Hey,
I'm the guy who builds Apollo for Reddit, an alternative iPhone app for Reddit that people on Apple have been really kind to in loving. I had a lot of fun working on the iOS 14 update with a ton of cool, customizable home screen Widgets, Picture in Picture video, and a bunch of other Reddit meets iOS 14 goodness, and now that all the new iPhones are out I wanted to celebrate it with a giveaway. (Who said those YouTubers get to have all the fun?)
I did this giveaway last year for iOS 13 if some of you remember and everyone seemed to have a great time, so I figured making it an annual thing could be fun. (Proof of winner) Plus the people who use Apollo are all super nice and give me awesome suggestions all the time for making it even better so consider it a thank you as well.

What Do I Win?

The winner gets their choice of any iPhone 12 model (Pro or non Pro, Max, normal sized or Mini) in any color and 128 GB capacity. Are you a BLUE person? RED? GOLD?! When this post is 24 hours old, at 11 PM GMT (countdown), I'll post in ApolloApp who the winner is, I'll also DM you for details and people will probably spam you as well.

Rules

Simply check out this thread and comment and you're entered! Don't spam jibberish though please, and no multiple comments. If you're looking for an idea for a comment, tell me your favorite iPhone model of all time, or the first third party app you remember downloading. Account must have been created at the time of this post to prevent creating accounts just to enter. You do not have to download Apollo to enter, but it may give you extra luck who knows.

Apollo? iOS 14 update?

Apollo is an alternative Reddit app for iOS with a focus on clean design and feeling right at home on iOS with a native design and adopting all the best, newest features, like Widgets, Picture in Picture video, super fast media viewer, and more. I started building it after finishing working at Apple in 2015 and have been working on it full time since. It's free to download and has over 100,000 five-star reviews, so you should really check it out! It's built solely by me, and I built it closely with community input to craft the best Reddit experience out there.
Even if you're used to the official app, I think you'll really like the improvements Apollo offers to your browsing experience, even if it just prevents you from getting Rick Roll'd.

Do you have any pets?

Yeah I have two cats named Hugo and Ruby. They're great, I also get to pet my neighbor's dog Leonard sometimes who is really cute. Sorry I don't have a picture of him but picture a big black shaggy dog.

Thank You!

Seriously, have some fun and best of luck! My whole job exists thanks to the kindness of this subreddit and community, so thank you and I'll do my best to continue to impress you with some more sick updates. :)
- Christian

Wanted to share some of my research on Digital Turbine, which in my view isn’t getting enough attention. The company owns a monopoly in the pre-load app space, has a lot of exciting growth opportunities, and is a great long-term buy. The stock is up over 650% over the past 12 months, so the valuation does seem stretched, but I could see the stock going to $100 within the next 6-12 months if the next few earnings calls don’t disappoint.
Super long post, TLDR on the bottom.
What Does Digital Turbine Do?

• Digital Turbine has created digital software called Ignite and its flagship product Dynamic Installs (70% of revenue) automatically pre-loads apps onto the phone for the Android market ONLY. Basically, if you buy a new Android device and you see Uber or Starbucks installed when you first boot up the phone, Digital Turbine is likely the company behind that.
• Digital Turbine has additional products (30% of revenue) including:
  • Wizard - a pop-up menu that shows up and asks users if they want to add apps onto their phone when booting up a new phone
  • SingleTap - a patented digital ad technology that allows users to frictionlessly download apps with one-click instead of having to go through multiple steps on the App Store
  • Notifications that pop on the user’s home screen recommending apps or content

Business Model

• The power of Digital Turbine’s business model comes from its extensive partnerships. The company has multi-year EXCLUSIVE contracts with many of the major phone carriers like Verizon and AT&T, OEMs like Samsung and LG, and advertisers which consist of 70% of the top apps on Google Play.
• To give you an example of how Digital Turbine makes money, let’s imagine Lyft wants to gain users on Android devices. Lyft could spend $100 marketing on Facebook or Snapchat to get new users but then they’re competing with the hundreds of thousands of other apps spending on ads, OR they could approach Digital Turbine and get a guaranteed number of pre-loaded apps onto phones for that same $100. Digital Turbine touts this to give companies a much better ROI.
  • Roughly a third of the revenue paid by an advertiser goes to the carrier, a third to the OEM, and a third to Digital Turbine
• Carriers and OEMs earn money from advertisers without much work on their end, while app developers are able to access millions of Android devices as long as their app is a good fit for the phone buyer
• To give you a sense of scale for the business, Digital Turbine to date has delivered 4.2 billion apps, has its software on more than 500 million phones, and is adding more than 20 million new devices each month

Growth Prospects

• Macroeconomic / secular trends
  • Though most US users love their iPhones the Android market actually dominates with an 80%+ market share worldwide, and this is not likely to change any time soon
  • Due to COVID-19, a lot of retail stores had to shut down, which resulted in less new phone sales, which means less revenue for Digital Turbine. With the return of the economy and with the next wave of 5G phones which will push customers to upgrade phones, the next few years look favorable for the company
• Mobile Posse
  • The company acquired Mobile Posse, which provides carriers like Verizon and OEMs like Samsung the ability to show phone users third party content through two products:
    • firstAPP which aggregates different media content and is shown right when a user unlocks the phone
    • firstPAGE which shows media content when a user opens the browser
  • The transaction closed in February 2020 and is a great complementary add to Digital Turbine for 3 reasons:
    • The deal was extremely fair in price. Mobile Posse was acquired for $66 million but $24.5 million of that is an estimated earn-out. With the company having generated $59 million in 2019 revenue, the company was purchased just over 1x revenue which in my opinion is a steal considering the company has a 5-year CAGR of 48% and is profitable
    • This acquisition makes Digital Turbine’s entire ecosystem more attractive to its partners by extending its product offerings throughout the life of the phone by being able to constantly show users content and ads. Mobile Posse’s content products will now consist of around a third of Digital Turbine’s revenue which is great because it decreases the company’s dependence on app pre-loads.
    • One of Mobile Posse’s primary carrier partners is T-Mobile which recently merged with Sprint, and this is the last major US carrier that Digital Turbine doesn’t have major business with. According to the latest earnings call, the CEO remains upbeat about signing T-Mobile and Sprint as partners, and the acquisition of Mobile Posse helps makes Digital Turbine more likely to sign on the carrier, which means more devices and an even stronger partnership network.
• International expansion
  • The third and most powerful opportunity for growth is international expansion. Currently, North America revenue accounts for roughly 65% of the company’s sales, but the real golden opportunity lies beyond in developing countries where Android is the dominant player.
  • In December 2018, Digital Turbine signed on Samsung as a partner, which paved the way for the company to sign on Telefonica, Telecom Italia, America Movil, Millicom, and AT&T Mexico in the past 1-2 years. Basically, this means Digital Turbine now partners with 2/3 of the OEMs in Latin America and an estimated 80% of mobile subscribers through carriers
  • The company also has a partnership with Reliance Jio, which covers 25% of the 1 billion mobile subscribers in India and has a partnership with Xiaomi which could lead to partnerships in China
  • All of this is to say that Digital Turbine is truly in the beginning stages of its international expansion, and I believe as investors are starting to see the company successfully execute, it’s beginning to draw more attention and hence why it’s stock has shot up over the past year

Financials

• In the latest quarterly earnings report, the company reported quarter over quarter revenue that is up 116% which is inflated due to the Mobile Posse acquisition but on a combined company basis, sales grew by 53%.
• The company also grew recurring revenue from 10% in the previous year to 40% which is a really good sign because it means revenue will be more reliable moving forward
• The company also reported 43% gross margin in the quarter as compared to 39% in the previous year, another great sign
• Company has just about as much debt as cash (~$17mm) and is profitable and cash-flow positive

Risks & mitigations

• First, is the valuation. Digital Turbine has experienced some explosive growth over the past year and in order to justify its share price, the company needs to execute well especially with its international expansion which is always tricky
  • However, I do think the management team has shown that it has been making all the right moves and I think the path to future growth as I laid out earlier in the video will lead to some nice surprise developments in the next few years
• Second, in its 10K, one of the biggest risks is that carriers or OEMs may start building their own services to work with advertisers, and if a big customer like Verizon or AT&T were to pull out their contracts, that would really hurt the company like when TikTok pulled from Fastly.
  • I think Digital Turbine is aware of this risk and that’s why it’s working hard to diversify its revenue stream by strengthening its product offerings through the acquisition of Mobile Posse and expanding internationally
• Lastly, there’s some criticism that Digital Turbine products are bloatware, and this would only be a problem if customers actually were turning away from devices because of the pre-loaded apps and home screen products Digital Turbine provides
  • Customers can always turn off any of Digital Turbine’s products and delete pre-loaded apps but more often than not, customers end up utilizing the company’s products in one form or another

What I’m Doing

• I’ve started a small position in the company a few weeks ago and plan to hold for the next few years
• Valuation looks a bit overstretched so I wouldn’t bet the farm on it at these prices but if the stock does have any major dips, I am going to treat them as major buying opportunities
• Company’s earnings report is on February 3rd, which will be really interesting to see what happens. Last quarter, the company reported strong earnings but the stock dropped 16% and rebounded quickly
• If the stock dips to the $30s or $40s, that would be an ideal great time to buy

Resources I looked at:

• Latest investor presentation
• 10Qs and 10Ks
• Mobile Posse acquisition presentation
• Company presentation from a Digital Turbine director at a conference

TLDR: Company owns a monopoly in the Android pre-load app space with partnerships with the largest carriers and OEMs in the world not named Apple; lots of good growth prospects including its recent acquisition + international expansion. Expensive stock fundamentally right now but good one to keep an eye on if there are any major dips. Strong buy in the $30s-40s. Medium buy in the $50s. Earnings call on February 3rd should materially move the stock either up or down so will be important to pay attention to that.

You Are The Real MVP - Why Genshin Impact Is The Real Game of the Year in 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLxgyp0pnMQ
Hi all, I see there is a lot of anger and anxiety toward Genshin Impact due to the wide audience it brought to the table, as well as a lot of misconceptions about the gacha gaming industry. I am 40 years old and have been gaming for over 30 years. I have 300+ DAYS /played in World of Warcraft and recently, over 1000 hours in Path of Exile with popular build guides with hundreds of replies. I also have played just about every major hit of every era on every platform. I really want to tell you who Mihoyo really is, how the gacha gaming industry works, and what Genshin Impact's future looks like.
Mihoyo's History
In 2011, three college students from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (comparable to Cornell in America) released their first game, FlyMe2TheMoon. When they graduated in 2013, they used their own money to make the first Honkai game (released as Zombiegal Kawaii overseas). This game allowed players to farm gold coins to buy all weapons and gear, only spend real money to speed up progress and came with glorious two players co-op way ahead of other mobile games at the time. At end of the day, players just didn't pay money for it. When they took it to investors, they were laughed at and ridiculed by everyone. Nobody is going to pay money for this silly anime stuff! You guys don't know how to monetize a game! Both of these games are still available on App Store, feel free to download them to check them out!
In 2014, on the verge of bankruptcy, the team learned monetization model from Puzzles & Dragons, the first-ever mobile game to break a billion dollars, and released Honkai 2 with the same art style and gameplay. The biggest change was moving to the gacha model. The game became a top-10 grossing title in China, released to overseas market as Guns GirlZ - Mirage Cabin and Guns Girl - Honkai Gakuen. Mihoyo the company was born. Today, Mihoyo has over 1000 employees and pays them more money than titans like Tencent and Netease, and runs their office in the ultra-expensive heart of Shanghai business district. Despite Genshin Impact's smashing global success and player's thirst for more content, they gave many of their employees a full 8 days break, standard with the 10/01 Chinese national holiday, for the historic job they did with the global launch. They understand it is a marathon, not a sprint.
For Mihoyo, the most important metric for their title will always be LIFETIME REVENUE, and they do not abandon their titles. All of them are still available. Honkai 2 is still getting content updates six years after release, even if the game itself is nothing more than a piece of history for them at this point. Honkai Impact 3 hit an all-time high revenue month this year, still makes a few hundred million dollars a year in China/Japan, three years after release, and Mihoyo took every dollar they made and spent an unprecedented 100 million dollars on a mobile game we know as Genshin Impact. You can count on Mihoyo to treat its most ambitious title ever with love and care, but you must remember they will always prioritize LIFETIME REVENUE over any other metric, which is what successful companies do because it is the only way to make the product best in class.
Fate Grand Order - Genshin Impact's TRUE inspiration
In 2015, Fate Grand Order was released as a turn-based mobile JRPG, the first six months it scored just $100 million dollars, and was on the verge of sinking into irrelevance. Five years later, the game grossed 4 billion dollars and became the most successful PVE game on any platform since GTA 5. How did it happen?
Many say it is the fate IP, but the truth is fate's IP is nothing special in a sea of big IPs trying to make a splash in mobile and failed miserably, just ask Nintendo how their two Mario games performed, or Square about their countless Final Fantasy mobile games. 80% of the billion-dollar games on mobile are actually brand new IP's.
The biggest challenge for every PVE game-as-a-service is monetization. PVP games like League of Legends and Fortnite do not need huge content updates to stay fresh and can maintain much higher daily active user counts to sell cosmetics, make $5 per player, and still hit a monster year. Monetizing PVE games is much harder. Players simply run out of things to do and quit the game, no matter how quickly you can produce content. Games like Path of Exile and Warframe struggle to break 100 million a year in revenue.
PVP gacha games like Summoners War and AFK Arena can rely on whales dueling each other to force meta changes, and they grew into billion-dollar franchises in their own right. But Fate Grand Order had a different idea in mind, what if you design amazing characters that are truly desirable, and price them at a low gacha rate so it takes thousands of dollars for rich players to max out their box by pulling multiple copies? You are never going to have the player base of a Candy Crush, let's try to maximize our revenue ceiling from whales instead, and make players emotionally attach to their characters because they are so well designed. The rest was history.
While there are indeed many generous gacha games like Granblue Fantasy, Azur Lane, Dragalia Lost, etc, none of them are in Fate Grand Order's tier if you look at their annual numbers, not even in the same ballpark. Other multi-billion dollar franchises like Puzzles and Dragons, Monster Strike also follow the same concept of greatly increasing the limit of what a whale can spend on a PVE game to max out a character. And yes, we are talking about providing strong benefits for getting multiple copies of the same character.
The numbers have proved time and time again, that maximizing whale spending in a PVE game is far more revenue than maximizing the number of monthly card players.
Genshin Impact's Target Audience
Any product that tries to be everything for everyone is doomed to fail. Mihoyo has very clear audiences in mind:

• Players who love anime graphic and ARPG, there is simply no AAA game out there in this genre. Tales series, Xenoblade, etc. are all low budget, low sales games. Granblue Relink is single platform and dead on arrival. There is no dominant franchise at all.
• Players who love Zelda's open-world exploration and environment interaction, but hate the difficult puzzles and survival/weapon durability/ammo aspect, and want constant content updates. Hey, a co-op mode with a real RPG system sounds amazing!
• Mobile players who want more than a simple game like Fate Grand Order. They want to do dailies during commute and don't mind doing harder content on PC/console. The game needs to look good on a big screen at home. They don't want to learn/maintain two different PVE games given how time-consuming these games are.
• Players who retired from MMORPG/ARPG's due to real-life commitments. Many of us who played World of Warcraft have kids now, and the outdated graphics, 20 buttons skill bar, the social requirements for raids . . . it is just too much to keep up. We want a simpler game that looks good and takes far less time to learn and play.

And let's just say they hit it out of the park with the greatest launch in gaming history. Never before a game hit PC/PS4/iOS/Android with cross-play on day one in 100 countries, 13 text language and 4 fully voiced languages, never before a game hit top 5 grossing in China/Japan/US/Korea at the same time, I don't even recall a marketing campaign did so well across so many drastically different regions and cultures. The AAA graphics, sound, incredible polish, you don't need me to tell you why this game is amazing. But from the competition's standpoint, the launch itself was like watching a bronze player climb to grandmaster overnight, and the game's biggest strength. Far bigger companies, franchises, do not dare to even think about launching a game at this scale. Mihoyo released the failed Honkai 1 overseas when the company was on the verge of collapsing, they always punched way above their weight when it comes to global releases.
Make no mistakes about it, this was never meant to be a single-player AAA game or a direct Diablo 3 / Path of Exile / Warframe competitor. It was meant to be a game that converts PC/console players to gacha gamers, by casting a wider net than any mobile game ever. They only need a small percentage of PC and console players to change their behaviors. The rest of them can play for free or leave and it won't hurt them at all. The monthly card is designed as a super good deal (look, WAY cheaper than World of Warcraft $15 per month) to get PC/console players to spend for the first time ever, breaks down their "why pay for a free game" defense. Once they pay once, the pity 5 star is always just a few dozen more pulls away, let me buy another pack! Before you know it, monthly cards are converted to dolphins, dolphins are converted to whales. It is by far the strongest business model for a PVE game today, and people who are new to the genre won't know what hit them.
Genshin Impact has an excellent chance to end Fate Grand Order's reign as the #1 most successful PVE game on any platform since 2016, by the virtue of being on every platform, and the same version across all regions.
LIFETIME REVENUE = Active Player Base * Spend Per Player * Longevity
For every game as a service, balancing these three variables is an incredibly difficult task. Can Mihoyo increase the rate on an event (like Cy Games gala events), put up a Diluc banner, and greatly increase spend per player? Yes, but they will provide less reason for people to pull on other days and lose out on long term revenue.
Likewise, the resin limitation is to prevent even whales from maxing out their characters and moving onto other games, that is why they have a hard limit on resin refill. Player progression is meticulously controlled to ensure content can keep up. A huge part of internal testing is to test how quickly a player of each spending level can go through content. Two-day, three-day, seven-day, and thirty-day player retention are critical metrics to F2P mobile games, you will always lose a huge number of players during these transitional phases. These are tried and true methods in gacha gaming to preserve the maximum number of players over the long haul. It is basically a much more advanced progression control than say, World of Warcraft's weekly raid lock outs. You have to FORCE your players to take breaks, or you will lose them way faster than you can churn out new content.
All four dailies, spend resins, and open-world exploration for crafting/ascension materials, a couple of chests/quest you missed, that is a health 60 minutes of gameplay. Gacha games provide resources for the next pull on every daily, every quest, every event. Getting a five star is a better feeling than getting any item drop in MMORPG/ARPG. Gacha games have a much stronger hold on its players because of this addiction, you are always very close to the next pull! Genshin Impact takes it a step further to actually encourage you to do single pulls over ten pulls. Over time resources will inevitably be loosened up as more contents are released, and daily quests and slowed down progression is there to keep you playing.
Behind the scenes, there is an ultra-complex data model that works tirelessly to balance all three variables. Looking at Mihoyo's track record with Honkai Impact 3, they know what they are doing to maximize LIFETIME REVENUE. With every gacha game like this, the developer has a price point they need to hit on a five star, then based on the competition they usually adjust the price significantly higher than what they consider to be acceptable. Whether it is gacha rate or stamina, once you reduce the price, you can never, ever increase it again. Start high and drop it when you need to is a much better strategy, and players think you listened to their feedback, win-win! If the daily active user doesn't drop while you keep the price high, why lower the price? The developer and player are always in a tug of war, with the developer testing player's limit on what is acceptable. It is just like how Apple kept iPhone with 2GB of memory and tiny screen size for a very long time because they are looking at the overall LIFETIME REVENUE, not because they didn't know their product needed these features.
Genshin Impact is priced at a premium because it has no competition, just like how Apple iPhones were priced at an ultra-premium when it first came out. Over time, prices will drop, resources will come easier, but until there is a real competitor, they do not need to care what lesser gacha games do. Do you think KeQing should be priced the same as a gacha character with PS1 graphics?
Genshin Impact's Future
100 million dollars estimate from Sensor Tower in two weeks does not include PC, PS4 and Chinese Android. Chinese Android revenue has been 1.8 times of China iOS for Honkai 3, many in the Chinese gaming industry speculate the true global revenue number of Genshin Impact is easily double of what Sensor Tower shows. Mihoyo is a private company and it fired one of the employees who bragged about the 09/15 China PC numbers, which was 10 million dollars, so we will never know the exact figures unless they go public. Don't expect Mihoyo to ever share revenue/player base numbers, that is just not how they operate.
There is no way the game can continue the 100 million dollars a week pace, that is 5 billion dollars a year, so for haters out there, you will see a massive decline in the player base between content updates, you will see the game falling out of top 10 grossing, you will get your "I told you so" moments when the weekly revenue drops by 50-70%. It is perfectly normal for gacha games between banners, and what Gensin Impact is doing is completely unsustainable. This is called filtering out users and building a stable player base.
However, even with the inevitable massive decline, this is a game destined to be a multi-billion dollar franchise. I personally give it a very conservative estimate of two billion dollars in three years. It will easily outperform the likes of BOTW, Cyberpunk 2077, etc. by the end of the first year in terms of the player base, hours played, and revenue. It will take money away from all other gacha games and force other developers to step up their game. It will take money away from long-standing multi-billion dollar PC PVE franchises like Dungeon Fighter Online, and to a lesser degree, MMORPG's like FF14. It will encourage companies to play with bigger budgets and provide PC/console releases for bigger mobile releases like Diablo Immortal, instead of relying on emulators. It will even change the monetization model for western F2P games. Iksar, lead designer of Hearthstone has been playing Genshin Impact since release. Imagine if Hearthstone didn't allow you to craft cards, and provided benefits to getting multiple copies of the same card. It is way too late for Hearthstone to change now, maybe there is still time to change Diablo Immortal's monetization model, I believe they will need either gacha or real-money auction house to be competitive.
But will Genshin Impact shake up the AAA industry? My personal opinion is no. Japanese developers do not have the technology to make mobile games at this level, you just need to look at the top 20 grossing Japanse mobile games. Western developers do not have the artwork to make characters so attractive, I mean just look at Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 characters, will whales spend $1000 on them? Whales spend enough money in gacha to pick up girls in real life many times over, many of them are ultra-rich and live a lavish lifestyle, just showing anime assets is not enough to win them over.
In all of my years playing Western games I have never been attached to a female character as I did with Artoria aka King Arthur of Fate Grand Order, I played the game for six months even if I don't really like turn-based JRPGs, and always enjoyed listening to her "Excalibur". Mihoyo is coming very close with some of Genshin Impact's character designs. I am not sure if Western culture is capable of creating the type of characters that can connect with players on an emotional level. Lara Croft is definitely not it. I believe Western gaming's general pursuit of realism and grittiness hurts them when it comes to creating an idealistic world and dreamy characters. Top western games tend to expose the harshness of real-world to players, instead of offering an escape. In many ways, Mihoyo's mastery of anime is closer to a Japanese company than Chinese company, it is not something you can just hire a couple of artists for. Likewise, the western market will always be 15-20% of the overall revenue for gacha games at best, it is difficult for western companies to justify making them with a AAA budget.
It is also incredibly hard to make a cross-platform PVE game on PC, Console, and Mobile look this good. It is not something you get from just licensing Unity. There are maybe a handful of companies out there capable of dropping 100 million dollars on a game like this, but until their main cash cow die, which studio dares to take this kind of risk? The tier 2-3 companies are simply not capable of spending 100 million dollars even if they went all in. I don't see a real competitor in two years, not even from Tencent and Netease, the bar is that high.
How You Should Approach It As A Player
If you are not a fan of gacha games, no problem! The best way is to play it like a free AAA game with unlimited free DLC's. With the amount of money this game makes, in a few years it will have more content than any other open-world game, and the developer will also be more generous over time as end game contents become more abundant. As their tools mature, the amount of time it takes to release contents across all platforms at the same time will shrink significantly, there will also be more events they can queue up. Every F2P player can get at least one five star character without rerolling if they complete most of the quests and use up their gifted currencies. I expect 100% F2P players will get at least 4 five-stars per year, 3 from pity, 1 from luck. I believe F2P with limited resources is a lot more fun and only spend money to support the developer. I am still 100% F2P on Genshin Impact as of today, because getting 20 pulls from the monthly card is not that exciting. I will wait for a one-time-only deal later in the game's life cycle.
For players who want to be a bit more involved, you can buy a monthly card, do your dailies, enjoy new content, enjoy the thrills of pulls, and pity 5 stars. Once Mihoyo gets a stable end game loop out there, they will definitely loosen up on resins. Just don't expect to play it like a Path of Exile season start. Save currencies and pity timer for a banner you want. Take it slow! Gacha games are designed to be played over many years, alongside other games. Take your Cyberpunk 2077 break, take your Call of Duty break, but in the end, there is simply no anime ARPG competition on any platform, and if you are into this kind of game, you will be back.

Hello!
So at time of writing I've been using my PM for about 24 hours now. I upgraded from an iPhone X.
Some personal thoughts:
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Pros:
The battery. Feels absolutely insane. I have about 2h screen on-time since charging today, and the battery is at 79% at the moment. Downloaded loads of apps and thousands of spotify songs yesterday, battery was at 60% ish when plugging it into the charger. Such a MASSIVE upgrade from my X which never lasted an entire day for me in the end.
The size. It's pretty much perfect I would say. I have average-sized hands and haven't noticed any problems with one-handed usage. It fits pretty good in my pocket, nothing more to say there really. Also the new design just feels sooo good in my hands.
The RAM. My old X couldn't handle more than 3-4 apps sometimes before killing a background process. It happened waaay too many times that I browsed youtube, opened up snapchat and reddit, then when going back to youtube it reloaded the app. Haven't happened yet on my PM, despite opening way more apps.
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Neutral:
The cameras. I am not a photographer and I did not buy this phone for the cameras. Most of my camera roll is just saved memes from Reddit. However, after comparing photos from both my X and my 12 PM, the differences are noticeable, but not major in any way. It feels better in low-light, though. Will probably do some more testing when the weather is not 1000% rain.
The price. Let's be real, most people buying this phone is not on a budget. You buy this if you want the best. Phones these days are expensive. I think the argument "how can a phone cost 1k that's insane" is ridiculous. It's not for you then. Just get a cheaper one.
​
Cons:
I have to say the weight. This is expected from such a big phone obviously, however, especially when lying in bed and watching youtube or whatever, my hand gets really tired after a while. I find it hard to use the phone one-handed for longer periods.
3D touch. I have to add this. It was such a nice feature on my X to just press hard anywhere on the keyboard to move the cursor. Now I have to press long on the spacebar, takes some time getting used to.
Questions? Thoughts from other Pro Max users?

Preface

Apple's M1 has caused a lot of people to start talking about and questioning the value of synthetic benchmarks, as well other (often indirect or badly controlled) information we have about the chip and its predecessors.
I recently got in a Twitter argument with Hardware Unboxed about this very topic, and given it was Twitter you can imagine why I feel I didn't do a great job explaining my point. This is a genuinely interesting topic with quite a lot of nuance, and the answer is neither ‘Geekbench bad’ nor ‘Geekbench good’.
Note that people have M1s in hand now, so this isn't a post about the M1 per se (you'll have whatever metric you want soon enough), it's just using this announcement to talk about the relative qualities of benchmarks, in the context of that discussion.

What makes a benchmark good?

A benchmark is a measure of a system, the purpose of which is to correlate reliably with actual or perceived performance. That's it. Any benchmark which correlates well is Good. Any benchmark that doesn't is Bad.
There a common conception that ‘real world’ benchmarks are Good and ‘synthetic’ benchmarks are Bad. While there is certainly a grain of truth to this, as a general rule it is wrong. In many aspects, as we'll discuss, the dividing line between ‘real world’ and ‘synthetic’ is entirely illusionary, and good synthetic benchmarks are specifically designed to tease out precisely those factors that correlate with general performance, whereas naïve benchmarking can produce misleading or unrepresentative results even if you are only benchmarking real programs. Most synthetic benchmarks even include what are traditionally considered real-world workloads, like SPEC 2017 including the time it takes for Blender to render a scene.
As an extreme example, large file copies are a real-world test, but a ‘real world’ benchmark that consists only of file copies would tell you almost nothing general about CPU performance. Alternatively, a company might know that 90% of their cycles are in a specific 100-line software routine; testing that routine in isolation would be a synthetic test, but it would correlate almost perfectly for them with actual performance.
On the other hand, it is absolutely true there are well-known and less-well-known issues with many major synthetic benchmarks.

Boost vs. sustained performance

Lots of people seem to harbour misunderstandings about instantaneous versus sustained performance.
Short workloads capture instantaneous performance, where the CPU has opportunity to boost up to frequencies higher than the cooling can sustain. This is a measure of peak performance or burst performance, and affected by boost clocks. In this regime you are measuring the CPU at the absolute fastest it is able to run.
Peak performance is important for making computers feel ‘snappy’. When you click an element or open a web page, the workload takes place over a few seconds or less, and the higher the peak performance, the faster the response.
Long workloads capture sustained performance, where the CPU is limited by the ability of the cooling to extract and remove the heat that it is generating. Almost all the power a CPU uses ends up as heat, so the cooling determines an almost completely fixed power limit. Given a sustained load, and two CPUs using the same cooling, where both of which are hitting the power limit defined by the quality of the cooling, you are measuring performance per watt at that wattage.
Sustained performance is important for demanding tasks like video games, rendering, or compilation, where the computer is busy over long periods of time.
Consider two imaginary CPUs, let's call them Biggun and Littlun, you might have Biggun faster than Littlun in short workloads, because Biggun has a higher peak performance, but then Littlun might be faster in sustained performance, because Littlun has better performance per watt. Remember, though, that performance per watt is a curve, and peak power draw also varies by CPU. Maybe Littlun uses only 1 Watt and Biggun uses 100 Watt, so Biggun still wins at 10 Watts of sustained power draw, or maybe Littlun can boost all the way up to 10 Watts, but is especially inefficient when doing so.
In general, architectures designed for lower base power draw (eg. most Arm CPUs) do better under power-limited scenarios, and therefore do relatively better on sustained performance than they do on short workloads.

On the Good and Bad of SPEC

SPEC is an ‘industry standard’ benchmark. If you're anything like me, you'll notice pretty quickly that this term fits both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. On the good, SPEC is an attempt to satisfy a number of major stakeholders, who have a vested interest in a benchmark that is something they, and researchers generally, can optimized towards. The selection of benchmarks was not arbitrary, and the variety captures a lot of interesting and relevant facets of program execution. Industry still uses the benchmark (and not just for marketing!), as does a lot of unaffiliated research. As such, SPEC has also been well studied.
SPEC includes many real programs, run over extended periods of time. For example, 400.perlbench runs multiple real Perl programs, 401.bzip2 runs a very popular compression and decompression program, 403.gcc tests compilation speed with a very popular compiler, and 464.h264ref tests a video encoder. Despite being somewhat aged and a bit light, the performance characteristics are roughly consistent with the updated SPEC2017, so it is not generally valid to call the results irrelevant from age, which is a common criticism.
One major catch from SPEC is that official benchmarks often play shenanigans, as compilers have found ways, often very much targeted towards gaming the benchmark, to compile the programs in a way that makes execution significantly easier, at times even because of improperly written programs. 462.libquantum is a particularly broken benchmark. Fortunately, this behaviour can be controlled for, and it does not particularly endanger results from AnandTech, though one should be on the lookout for anomalous jumps in single benchmarks.
A more concerning catch, in this circumstance, is that some benchmarks are very specific, with most of their runtime in very small loops. The paper Performance Characterization of SPEC CPU2006 Integer Benchmarks on x86-64 Architecture (as one of many) goes over some of these in section IV. For example, most of the time in 456.hmmer is in one function, and 464.h264ref's hottest loop contains many repetitions of the same line. While, certainly, a lot of code contains hot loops, the performance characteristics of those loops is rarely precisely the same as for those in some of the SPEC 2006 benchmarks. A good benchmark should aim for general validity, not specific hotspots, which are liable to be overtuned.
SPEC2006 includes a lot of workloads that make more sense for supercomputers than personal computers, such as including lots of Fortran code and many simulation programs. Because of this, I largely ignore the SPEC floating point; there are users for whom it may be relevant, but not me, and probably not you. As another example, SPECfp2006 includes the old rendering program POV-Ray, which is no longer particularly relevant. The integer benchmarks are not immune to this overspecificity; 473.astar is a fairly dated program, IMO. Particularly unfortunate is that many of these workloads are now unrealistically small, and so can almost fit in some of the larger caches.
SPEC2017 makes the great decision to add Blender, as well as updating several other programs to more relevant modern variants. Again, the two benchmarks still roughly coincide with each other, so SPEC2006 should not be altogether dismissed, but SPEC2017 is certainly better.
Because SPEC benchmarks include disaggregated scores (as in, scores for individual sub-benchmarks), it is easy to check which scores are favourable. For SPEC2006, I am particularly favourable to 403.gcc, with some appreciation also for 400.perlbench. The M1 results are largely consistent across the board; 456.hmmer is the exception, but the commentary discusses that quirk.

(and the multicore metric)

SPEC has a ‘multicore’ variant, which literally just runs many copies of the single-core test in parallel. How workloads scale to multiple cores is highly test-dependent, and depends a lot on locks, context switching, and cross-core communication, so SPEC's multi-core score should only be taken as a test of how much the chip throttles down in multicore workloads, rather than a true test of multicore performance. However, a test like this can still be useful for some datacentres, where every core is in fact running independently.
I don't recall AnandTech ever using multicore SPEC for anything, so it's not particularly relevant. whups

On the Good and Bad of Geekbench

Geekbench does some things debatably, some things fairly well, and some things awfully. Let's start with the bad.
To produce the aggregate scores (the final score at the end), Geekbench does a geometric mean of each of the two benchmark groups, integer and FP, and then does a weighted arithmetic mean of the crypto score with the integer and FP geometric means, with weights 0.05, 0.65, and 0.30. This is mathematical nonsense, and has some really bad ramifications, like hugely exaggerating the weight of the crypto benchmark.
Secondly, the crypto benchmark is garbage. I don't always agree with his rants, but Linus Torvald's rant is spot on here: https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=196293&curpostid=196506. It matters that CPUs offer AES acceleration, but not whether it's X% faster than someone else's, and this benchmark ignores that Apple has dedicated hardware for IO, which handles crypto anyway. This benchmark is mostly useless, but can be weighted extremely high due to the score aggregation issue.
Consider the effect on these two benchmarks. They are not carefully chosen to be perfectly representative of their classes.

M1 vs 5900X: single core score 1742 vs 1752

Note that the M1 has crypto/int/fp subscores of 2777/1591/1895, and the 5900X has subscores of 4219/1493/1903. That's a different picture! The M1 actually looks ahead in general integer workloads, and about par in floating point! If you use a mathematically valid geometric mean (a harmonic mean would also be appropriate for crypto), you get scores of 1724 and 1691; now the M1 is better. If you remove crypto altogether, you get scores of 1681 and 1612, a solid 4% lead for the M1.
Unfortunately, many of the workloads beyond just AES are pretty questionable, as many are unnaturally simple. It's also hard to characterize what they do well; the SQLite benchmark could be really good, if it was following realistic usage patterns, but I don't think it is. Lots of workloads, like the ray tracing one, are good ideas, but the execution doesn't match what you'd expect of real programs that do that work.
Note that this is not a criticism of benchmark intensity or length. Geekbench makes a reasonable choice to only benchmark peak performance, by only running quick workloads, with gaps between each bench. This makes sense if you're interested in the performance of the chip, independent of cooling. This is likely why the fanless Macbook Air performs about the same as the 13" Macbook Pro with a fan. Peak performance is just a different measure, not more or less ‘correct’ than sustained.
On the good side, Geekbench contains some very sensible workloads, like LZMA compression, JPEG compression, HTML5 parsing, PDF rendering, and compilation with Clang. Because it's a benchmark over a good breadth of programs, many of which are realistic workloads, it tends to capture many of the underlying facets of performance in spite of its flaws. This means it correlates will with, eg., SPEC 2017, even though SPEC 2017 is a sustained benchmark including big ‘real world’ programs like Blender.
To make things even better, Geekbench is disaggregated, so you can get past the bad score aggregation and questionable benchmarks just by looking at the disaggregated scores. In the comparison before, if you scroll down you can see individual scores. M1 wins the majority, including Clang and Ray Tracing, but loses some others like LZMA and JPEG compression. This is what you'd expect given the M1 has the advantage of better speculation (eg. larger ROB) whereas the 5900X has a faster clock.

(and under Rosetta)

We also have Geekbench scores under Rosetta. There, one needs to take a little more caution, because translation can sometimes behave worse on larger programs, due to certain inefficiencies, or better when certain APIs are used, or worse if the benchmark includes certain routines (like machine learning) that are hard to translate well. However, I imagine the impact is relatively small overall, given Rosetta uses ahead-of-time translation.

(and the multicore metric)

Geekbench doesn't clarify this much, so I can't say much about this. I don't give it much attention.

(and the GPU compute tests)

GPU benchmarks are hugely dependent on APIs and OSs, to a degree much larger than for CPUs. Geekbench's GPU scores don't have the mathematical error that the CPU benchmarks do, but that doesn't mean it's easy to compare them. This is especially true given there are only a very limited selection of GPUs with 1st party support on iOS.
None of the GPU benchmarks strike me as particularly good, in the way that benchmarking Clang is easily considered good. Generally, I don't think you should have much stock in Geekbench GPU.

On the Good and Bad of microarchitectural measures

AnandTech's article includes some of Andrei's traditional microarchitectural measures, as well as some new ones I helped introduce. Microarchitecture is a bit of an odd point here, in that if you understand how CPUs work well enough, then they can tell you quite a lot about how the CPU will perform, and in what circumstances it will do well. For example, Apple's large ROB but lower clock speed is good for programs with a lot of latent but hard to reach parallelism, but would fair less well on loops with a single critical path of back-to-back instructions. Andrei has also provided branch prediction numbers for the A12, and again this is useful and interesting for a rough idea.
However, naturally this cannot tell you performance specifics, and many things can prevent an architecture living up to its theoretical specifications. It is also difficult for non-experts to make good use of this information. The most clear-cut thing you can do with the information is to use it as a means of explanation and sanity-checking. It would be concerning if the M1 was performing well on benchmarks with a microarchitecture that did not suggest that level of general performance. However, at every turn the M1 does, so the performance numbers are more believable for knowing the workings of the core.

On the Good and Bad of Cinebench

Cinebench is a real-world workload, in that it's just the time it takes for a program in active use to render a realistic scene. In many ways, this makes the benchmark fairly strong. Cinebench is also sustained, and optimized well for using a huge number of cores.
However, recall what makes a benchmark good: to correlate reliably with actual or perceived performance. Offline CPU ray tracing (which is very different to the realtime GPU-based ray tracing you see in games) is an extremely important workload for many people doing 3D rendering on the CPU, but is otherwise a very unusual workload in many regards. It has a tight rendering loop with very particular memory requirements, and it is almost perfectly parallel, to a degree that many workloads are not.
This would still be fine, if not for one major downside: it's only one workload. SPEC2017 contains a Blender run, which is conceptually very similar to Cinebench, but it is not just a Blender run. Unless the work you do is actually offline, CPU based rendering, which for the M1 it probably isn't, Cinebench is not a great general-purpose benchmark.
(Note that at the time of the Twitter argument, we only had Cinebench results for the A12X.)

On the Good and Bad of GFXBench

GFXBench, as far as I can tell, makes very little sense as a benchmark nowadays. Like I said for Geekbench's GPU compute benchmarks, these sort of tests are hugely dependent on APIs and OSs, to a degree much larger than for CPUs. Again, none of the GPU benchmarks strike me as particularly good, and most tests look... not great. This is bad for a benchmark, because they are trying to represent the performance you will see in games, which are clearly optimized to a different degree.
This is doubly true when Apple GPUs use a significantly different GPU architecture, Tile Based Deferred Rendering, which must be optimized for separately. EDIT: It has been pointed out that as a mobile-first benchmark, GFXBench is already properly optimized for tiled architectures.

On the Good and Bad of browser benchmarks

If you look at older phone reviews, you can see runs of the A13 with browser benchmarks.
Browser benchmark performance is hugely dependent on the browser, and to an extent even the OS. Browser benchmarks in general suck pretty bad, in that they don't capture the main slowness of browser activity. The only thing you can realistically conclude from these browser benchmarks is that browser performance on the M1, when using Safari, will probably be fine. They tell you very little about whether the chip itself is good.

On the Good and Bad of random application benchmarks

The Affinity Photo beta comes with a new benchmark, which the M1 does exceptionally well in. We also have a particularly cryptic comment from Blackmagicdesign, about DaVinci Resolve, that the “combination of M1, Metal processing and DaVinci Resolve 17.1 offers up to 5 times better performance”.
Generally speaking, you should be very wary of these sorts of benchmarks. To an extent, these benchmarks are built for the M1, and the generalizability is almost impossible to verify. There's almost no guarantee that Affinity Photo is testing more than a small microbenchmark.
This is the same for, eg., Intel's ‘real-world’ application benchmarks. Although it is correct that people care a lot about the responsiveness of Microsoft Word and such, a benchmark that runs a specific subroutine in Word (such as conversion to PDF) can easily be cherry-picked, and is not actually a relevant measure of the slowness felt when using Word!
This is a case of what are seemingly ‘real world’ benchmarks being much less reliable than synthetic ones!

On the Good and Bad of first-party benchmarks

Of course, then there are Apple's first-party benchmarks. This includes real applications (Final Cut Pro, Adobe Lightroom, Pixelmator Pro and Logic Pro) and various undisclosed benchmark suites (select industry-standard benchmarks, commercial applications, and open source applications).
I also measured Baldur's Gate 3 in a talk running at ~23-24 FPS at 1080 Ultra, at the segment starting 7:05. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/10859
Generally speaking, companies don't just lie in benchmarks. I remember a similar response to NVIDIA's 30 series benchmarks. It turned out they didn't lie. They did, however, cherry-pick, specifically including benchmarks that most favoured the new cards. That's very likely the same here. Apple's numbers are very likely true and real, and what I measured from Baldur's Gate 3 will be too, but that's not to say other, relevant things won't be worse.
Again, recall what makes a benchmark good: to correlate reliably with actual or perceived performance. A biased benchmark might be both real-world and honest, but if it's also likely biased, it isn't a good benchmark.

On the Good and Bad of the Hardware Unboxed benchmark suite

This isn't about Hardware Unboxed per se, but it did arise from a disagreement I had, so I don't feel it's unfair to illustrate with the issues in Hardware Unboxed's benchmarking. Consider their 3600 review.
Here are the benchmarks they gave for the 3600, excluding the gaming benchmarks which I take no issue with.
3D rendering

• Cinebench (MT+ST)
• V-Ray Benchmark (MT)
• Corona 1.3 Benchmark (MT)
• Blender Open Data (MT)

Compression and decompression

• WinRAR (MT)
• 7Zip File Manager (MT)
• 7Zip File Manager (MT)

Other

• Adobe Premiere Pro video encode (MT)

(NB: Initially I was going to talk about the 5900X review, which has a few more Adobe apps, as well as a crypto benchmark for whatever reason, but I was worried that people would get distracted with the idea that “of course he's running four rendering workloads, it's a 5900X”, rather than seeing that this is what happens every time.)
To have a lineup like this and then complain about the synthetic benchmarks for M1 and the A14 betrays a total misunderstanding about what benchmarking is. There are a total of three real workloads here, one of which is single threaded. Further, that one single threaded workload is one you'll never realistically run single threaded. As discussed, offline CPU rendering is an atypical and hard to generalize workload. Compression and decompression are also very specific sorts of benchmarks, though more readily generalizable. Video encoding is nice, but this still makes for a very thin picking.
Thus, this lineup does not characterize any realistic single-threaded workloads, nor does it characterize multi-core workloads that aren't massively parallel.
Contrast this to SPEC2017, which is a ‘synthetic benchmark’ of the sort Hardware Unboxed was criticizing. SPEC2017 contains a rendering benchmark (526.blender) and a compression benchmark (557.xz), and a video encode benchmark (525.x264), but it also contains a suite of other benchmarks, chosen specifically so that all the benchmarks measure different aspects of the architecture. It includes workloads like Perl, GCC, workloads that stress different aspects of memory, plus extremely branchy searches (eg. a chess engine), image manipulation routines, etc. Geekbench is worse, but as mentioned before, it still correlates with SPEC2017, by virtue of being a general benchmark that captures most aspects of the microarchitecture.
So then, when SPEC2017 contains your workloads, but also more, and with more balance, how can one realistically dismiss it so easily? And if Geekbench correlates with SPEC2017, then how can you dismiss that, at least given disaggregated metrics?

In conclusion

The bias against ‘synthetic benchmarks’ is understandable, but misplaced. Any benchmark is synthetic, by nature of abstracting speed to a number, and any benchmark is real world, by being a workload you might actually run. What really matters is knowing how each workload is represents your use-case (I care a lot more about compilation, for example), and knowing the issues with each benchmark (eg. Geekbench's bad score aggregation).
Skepticism is healthy, but skepticism is not about rejecting evidence, it is about finding out the truth. The goal is not to have the benchmarks which get labelled the most Real World™, but about genuinely understanding the performance characteristics of these devices—especially if you're a CPU reviewer. If you're a reviewer who dismisses Geekbench, but you haven't read the Geekbench PDF characterizing the workload, or your explanation stops at ‘it's short’, or ‘it's synthetic’, you can do better. The topics I've discussed here are things I would consider foundational, if you want to characterize a CPU's performance. Stretch goals would be to actually read the literature on SPEC, for example, or doing performance counter-aided analysis of the benchmarks you run.
Normally I do a reread before publishing something like this to clean it up, but I can't be bothered right now, so I hope this is good enough. If I've made glaring mistakes (I might've, I haven't done a second pass), please do point them out.