> For as long as I can remember, before M1, Macs were always behind in the CPU department. PC's had much better value if you cared about CPU performance.

But not if you cared about battery life, because that was the tradeoff Apple was making. Which worked great until about 2015-2016. The parts they were using were not Intel’s priority and it went south basically after Broadwell, IIRC. I also suppose that Apple stopped investing heavily into a dead-end platform while they were working on the M1 generation some time before it was announced.