Intel makes laptop ships too and those don't use 100W.
Why does everyone these days hate consumer choice and market diversity so much?
A lot of people got into CPU topics because Apple created their M1s and they think that ARM is some unparallelled thing that every1 must adopt and that Apple's design goals are most important (other market segments are irrelevant)
Why do you need to pull in Apple so badly into this?
This bloviating is really getting tiring here - this is the most expensive, most highend chip that people put into gaming machines and their worstations. People who really want the maxiumum power no matter the cost or heat.
If you utter "laptop", "M", "ARM" in this context you're not the target market for this chip. That's OK. Not everything needs to be a medium powered laptop chip for browsing.
It's not about Arm. All of Apple's M chips so far have been primarily designed for mobile use, and that strongly affects how the power usage scales. It makes a basic comparison of watts not very useful.
There, you said it again. This is wrong - you hear Apple M chip and you think "laptop" primarily, but that is no longer true. Just as it would be to say ARM is primarily for smartphones. Now I don't want to talk about sales numbers, but the M chips in the Apple Studio and Mac Pro (and those used by other manufacturers in servers) are a different category than "laptop". For a quick shallow impression see: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i9-14900k-v...
(nevermind it's the i9-14900K)
Again, the I9 is more powerful, but that doesn't make all of ARM or M a "laptop".
The M2 ultra is basically two M2 Maxs stuck together. It's the same chip that's in laptops, and was designed around a laptop power budget.
In what way is it in a different category?
Designing for different power targets has a significant effect on power and performance metrics. When a chip is designed to be able to take tons of watts, that hurts its efficiency even when you're currently running at a low wattage. So comparing chips with different wattage philosophies gets tricky.
They shouldn't even be compared since they target different audiences.