That's an interesting point, actually. Samsung doesn't need to compete with the M1, it only needs to compete with Celerons and Athlons to make a profit.

As far as most consumers are concerned, even Exynos chips may be worth it for desktop use because they can use the extensive video acceleration support that mobile GPUs have which many desktop chips still lack.

Sadly, the Windows world is far from ARM-compatible. Few people install applications through the Windows Store, and bringing Linux to the masses with an alternative, low-power laptop processor will probably end up failing as well. I fear that the lack of software support will prevent Samsung for replicating Apple's success.

Maybe Samsung can stuff these chips into Chromebooks, those provide a limited yet cross-platform operating system that some markets are getting used to already. There are plenty of ARM Chromebooks out there, so I'm not sure how well Samsung could compete in that space.

They also had Linux on Dex which was a full Linux desktop environment. Unfortunately it never left beta and was killed off.

Dex isn't bad. I use it from time to time. It's really not much different from a chromebook. I'd use a dex laptop if it was available.

I think the original comment was referring to the initial backlash Samsung received after putting inferior Exynos Chips into non-US devices, that were significantly less performant while drawing more power than the devices with the Qualcomm counterpart.

The latest exynos chip replaced Samsung's custom CPU designs with stock ARM ones, presumably because exynos variants of the S20 lagged far behind the snapdragon variants in performance and battery life.