Is the M series that much better than a modern ADM/Intel? Or is it that they barely need cooling? I have an AMD laptop and Mac Mini, the Mac never makes any noise. Or is the M series just faster?
Price-wise, you're still often better off with amd64. People like to compare the top-end chips, but the competition for a huge slab of amd64 is a small laptop running an iPhone CPU, not the M6 Ultra or whatever the latest and greatest is today. After Apple followed the rest of the industry, the launch price advantage of the Neo quickly grew smaller, especially outside of the USA. If you want a 15 inch laptop, you're pretty deep into high end prices the moment you consider a Macbook.
In practice, getting the M series to run Linux takes longer than it takes Qualcomm to release a Linux build that works, and amd64 takes a few months of actual vendor support rather than enthusiasts hacking away for free, so in that sense the M series is still behind.
I have an m1 16gb MBpro in our fleet for editing and it runs probably as fast as the day I got it (first wave of m1’s).
The low power draw is also very impressive. Fraction of my AMD rig at home.
And even on my desktop, where battery life doesn't matter, I wouldn't mind my CPU needing less cooling.
I say this as someone who will probably never own a mac.
This is a natural major conflict with the qualities of a laptop that’s good at being a laptop, but yeah, I’d prefer that my custom built tower be efficient, cool, inaudible, and a small as reasonably possible without severely impinging expandability.
I’ve heard of people building desktops around mobile x86 CPUs soldered onto ITX/mATX boards, which sounds like it might be the solution that mainstream manufacturers don’t want to give us. Even a modest desktop cooling solution is vastly more capable than what can be fit into a laptop and so should keep such a CPU chilly with ease.