And meanwhile they're both getting cucked by Apple because the Intel/AMD brand monoliths are too heavy to make any groundbreaking/architectural changes now.
The m2 chip is more power efficient, but it can't compete against Intel and amd
Intel beats Apple at most specs but the margin is too small to say Apple "can't compete", especially for a company that didn't even have a desktop CPU three years ago.
In desktops (Mac Studio etc) where you can run unlimited watts, yeah Apple doesn't do as well there, but the efficiency is still amazing. And in the laptops, the actual user experience shows the cinebench numbers aren't capturing something.
Well of course a newer laptop of going to be "snappier" lmao.
"My new car is faster and more fuel efficient than my old car"
I've had quite a few MBs and they all slow down after a while, needing an overhaul/refresh in the same way that windows machines, phones etc do.
Get that red memory pressure and kernel desperately swapping pages in & out, woooo. Perhaps things are different with >16GB machines with the SSD mostly empty.
It helps that it's Unix on the desktop. If you're comparing against a Windows install then I'm sure yes it will be way snappier, if you're comparing against Linux it really shouldn't be. Linux doesn't always have powersaving down quite right etc though, ofc.
The sales pitch of OS X to powerusers imo is that it's Unix on the desktop that is well-supported by the vendor and has a good ecosystem of professionally made apps. If you want to tinker there's nothing inherently bad about Linux either, but OS X actually does just work fairly well, although it's not without flaws as well. But it's faster than Windows, less amateur than Linux, actually has a user base unlike BSD. So it sits in an interesting spot - the "willing to spend money" niche.
There are a number of downsides and unpleasant aspects to OS X too, of course. But yeah, it's inherently going to be snappier than Windows if that's your reference point, *nix generally is, that's not OSX exclusive either.
People are generally more hostile to vendor hardware-software integration today than they used to be in the past, I think. Amiga, BeOS, SGI, HP-UX, Solaris, Cray, Nonstop, zSystem, CUDA... there is a lot of the computing world that runs on proprietary hardware-software integration and always has.
It has been an interesting sea change that people see open/plays nice as the default, it's an interesting sign of how copyleft has won in the long term that proprietary is seen as greedy/suspicious in general. I've been feeling that's a significant thing for a while. People are hostile to these products when sometimes it's simply paying more for a specific thing or a niche, if you want a premium *nix laptop the M1s are very nice actually.
There's a reason it's an "ARM" processor & not an "Apple" one, even though yes, Apple did contribute a lot of their own design to their specific chip.
Unfortunately, Apple took the shortcut of gaining performance by having memory/SB/NB/kitchen sink all together on the same die, which is very...not scalable. It's a good way to be "top in class" for the class your in, but it comes with a ceiling; you can't hit the higher levels because where competitors can use the whole die for processor, Apple are stuck using only part of the die, the rest being used for memory/controllers, etc.
Absolutely stellar architecture for laptops for sure, but not so great for desktops/servers, imo.
The memory isn’t on the same die in the M-series chips.