Edit - this is a comment about branding ie how Apple presents itself not actual performance.
But the actual machines have always been merely "good enough". The 68k macs lagged PCs significantly. PPC had a brief moment where it was faster than 486/P5 devices but then got demolished by P6+ cores, to the extent that Apple had to switch to Intel themselves. Then for almost two decades they shipped what amounted to the same silicon as high end windows laptops. MacBooks were "high performance", but not in a way that wasn't accessible to HP or Lenovo.
But all that relies on it not being a lie. If you lock your platform marketing not into merely "Insanely Great" but into the idea of Apple Silicon being best, then you need to make damn sure it actually is. And right now it is! But it needs to stay that way if you're going to bet the platform on it.
Exactly the point I made.
I've got a Mac Mini M1 as soon as it came out.
I recently got a Ryzen PC, 6 core 5600G w/ 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD. Cost approx £500. Upgrading the M1 spec from 256GB SSD to 1TB (£400) costs basically the same as the entire PC I bought. I'm impressed with the 5600G, it is super cool and quiet compared to what I was expecting and the 32GB of RAM makes much more of a difference to performance than the extra CPU perf of the M1.
It's really a bit ridiculous that Apple is still selling products with a base config of 8/256. I'm pretty sure that hasn't increased since I got the retina macbook pro in 2012 unless I'm mistaken?
On a MacBook PRO no less.
They were still using 128GB SSDs in the entry-level 13" MBP from 2015 (replaced by the touchbar MBP in late 2016, but not actually discontinued until sometime in 2017).
I made no comment about actual performance.
Apple has publicly stated during their keynotes (albeit with slides that present minimal information) the efficiency their CPU holds over the aforementioned companies. And that isn't even going into the mobile space where Apple still holds the crown when it comes to performance on synthetic workloads.
Revisiting the keynote where the M1 was introduced [1] at 8:48 Apple states that the M1 uses the world's fastest CPU, which ties back into your argument, but then at 9:51 talks about performance per watt.
Apple does it again when the M2 was announced [2] at 58:21.
This isn't to say your argument isn't a valid one, and I hope I didn't give the impression that it is wrong; the optics has, at least in my perspective, shifted towards preferring power efficiency over raw performance output. What with tech news of x86 CPUs and GPUs from Nvidia and AMD consuming more and more power the M1 and M2 sip power by comparison.
No one doubts the performance of Apple devices, it's mainly efficiency by which it does so that has everyone paying attention to it.