Very much so.

No fan noise, no warmth, unless you are really really pushing it.

in terms of speed, it makes it feel like the original retina did when they first came out. oh and a pretty fast disk as well.

In terms of performance, thermals, and battery life, it was a huge upgrade for me when I moved from Intel to the M1 Max. M1 Max to the M4 Max... improvements were mainly on very heavy tasks, like video transcoding with Handbrake or LLMs with Ollama.

Yes... to any Apple Silicon machine.

It is night and day between the last intel macbook and the m1. I held out for a long time because of poor python support, but that was not a good move. The m1 is much better.