I realize I wrote that wrong, but what I meant to say, it's not slower than the old M chip. That is, it's not slower than all of the M chips. I realize that's a very different thing than what I wrote, my bad.
But it's also true that it's within the range of the M chips, and it's intended to be low cost and low power, and if you have low expectations then it should be plenty of machine. For your average web surfer, it'll be fine. I wouldn't buy one, even at their most Open, Apple was irritating at best to deal with. But to me the tradeoff is reminiscent of my AMD laptop, which has only a couple of cores and a few GPU cores (literally) and does all the things I expected it to do while using very little power. It was $300 in a retail box a couple of years ago. This is the Apple-priced version of that, which is another reason I wouldn't buy one.