Exactly. You could argue that if Apple is happy with this situation where some of its customers get worse products than others, then this is absolutely worth punishing Apple for. And a good way to do this is by publishing benchmark reviews with bad values for the new thing.
They all meet a baseline standard, it's just some people get machines that are above those baselines. Yes, sometimes the "good" machine from a previous generation will outperform the baseline from the next generation in a given benchmark, but that's an inevitability of having machines that outperform the baselines of their generation.
This really depends on where you set the baseline standard.
You may see the worst-performing variants of a given model as defining the baseline, with some being above the baseline.
But it's perfectly legitimate to define the baseline at the best-performing variants of a given model, with some unfortunately being below the baseline.
Personally, I prefer to set expectations high, and define the baseline based on the best that has been achieved so far. The worst-performing variant from 2014 should still be expected to exceed, or at the very worst be equal to, the best-performing variant from 2013.
