I feel like I need ridiculously powerful hardware now just to do the same things I was doing 15 years ago - web browsing, web development, a photo library and playing music.
All this crap they’re adding should be able to be toggled off.
Beyond that, what actual stuff are you talking about?
There is really nothing to see here.
By that I mean performance improvements that sounds like they should be faster, but don't scale as well as simply brute forcing.
The other is "security". My work Mac has 3 different VPN/Network Proxies and 2 malware checkers. I would assume that each one is caching network details, as I have to go in an disable/enable them all once or twice a day to restore network performance.
It's like the whole multiple anti-virus conflicts on Windows again like no one ever learnt.
The M1 is 3 years old now but if you packaged it up in a new shell and told me it’s the 2023 edition, I wouldn’t know otherwise.