The most impressive part to me is how the m1 compares to the 3900X. I’ve got a mere 3600X and every laptop I owned or worked on over the past year is noticeably and painfully slower than the 3600X. It’s been a relief to get home and turn on my desktop. It doesn’t matter if the laptops I’m using are very recent i7’s and i9’s, the desktop is always very noticeably faster.

I got my m1 MacBook Pro 16GB yesterday and was pretty confused to find that Rust compilation felt faster than the desktop. To go from recent Intel laptops taking two to three times longer to compile Rust than my budget desktop despite the laptops' whiny fans and extreme heat, to having my desktop be sightly outclassed by an ice cold laptop on battery (which got at least 15 hours of use, including said compiling, with no need to charge) is a world changer. I can’t remember the last time a laptop was this close to desktop performance for my everyday workflow.

Now that I think about it, I haven’t even tried optimising compile times on the MacBook like I usually do with Rust projects. My desktop would have been running lld at least to make its compilation significantly faster, and the MacBook more than kept up in spite of the handicap.