Initially, the Tame Apple Press hyped Apple’s chip and mocked Intel’s ability to provide chips for Macs. Now it might have to eat its words.

Intel claimed at CES that its new Alder Lake mobile chips would be the fastest mobile chips ever made and no one in the Tame Apple Press believed it, but now that the flagships are out, Apple’s offering is looking decidedly slow.

According to the Verge, the 14-core Core i9-12900HK, inside MSI’s GE76 Raider gaming laptop is proof that Intel was right.

The GE76 Raider beat Apple’s MacBooks in most benchmarks, leaving the Verge, which is normally an Apple cheerleader scratching around for excuses. The excuse was pretty thin particularly when it started to complain about price and battery life.

But it does beg the question of what Apple hoped to get out of walking away from Intel and AMD to create its own chips. It would have looked good on paper, but Apple still has to spend a fortune in R&D to stay on a par with the real chipmakers. There is going to be a race in Chip tech soon as Intel starts to chase AMD and Apple will find itself falling behind fast.

If it had followed its previous policy, it would have just picked the winners for this year’s technology and not had to spend anything. Now it has to spend a fortune to reinvent what another company has already done, much better.