What on earth are you talking about?! Alder Lake was a huge step up for Intel, and Raptor Lake has improved things more than I would have expected as well. Before Alder Lake, Intel's CPUs honestly sucked. AMD still seems to have a modest competitive advantage in terms of efficiency and battery life (making AMD not that far off from where Apple is in hours of practical battery life when doing something other than looking at a static screenshot for hours on end), but Intel makes up for that with performance, and as I recall, Alder Lake is still more efficient than what Intel had before in laptops.
Sapphire Rapids is also a huge innovation compared to what Intel had been doing for years in the server market. Intel has also been introducing some really interesting GPU products now to bring competition to AMD and Nvidia, but it will probably take another generation or two to iron things out. If none of that is "innovation", then I don't know what is!
The last 2 years are the first time Intel has really been innovating in the past 5+ years!
When M1 came out, it was awesome. Since then, Intel and AMD have released processors that are significantly more competitive, while M2 was a mediocre step forward. I appreciate my M2 MBA, but Apple Silicon needs a huge upgrade with M3 to remain competitive.
For a lot of legitimate use cases, there are at least half a dozen Windows laptops coming out right now that I would instantly pick over a MacBook, and the same would not have been said 2 years ago.