Watch this video if you have time: https://youtu.be/6AtTk3XoQVs

TL;DW: 2010s intel mac era laptops have seen at very best 35% single core CPU performance over in 5 years time! This happens almost every year now with M line macs.

Rant:

Retina macs were great and had great form factor over unibody macs. Touch-bar macs in the mid 2010s was IMHO a disaster. Terrible keyboard, poorer thermal capacity, missing essential ports, adapters galore.

But when it comes to performance - early 2010s macbooks with dedicated gpus had serious overheating issues.

Retina macbooks were decent, both form factor and performance.

Touch-bar macs were totally abysmal, all performance gains over previous generations was all through pumping more heat. CPUs constantly pegged at 90C+, cannot have laptop on your lap, Apple planning and delaying release schedules around intel fumbling their tik/tok cycles (as far as i remember some macs did not get any improvements for 2 years+ if not way more). Upgrades sometimes were total jokes, because of thermal throttling there was no point to put more hardware than it could work with. From reviews buying higher level cpu sometimes didn’t give noticeable real life gains because, again, thermal throttling kicking in instantly. 2020 intel macbook pro has fans spinning almost all the time. Having a remote call - your battery is dead in 2h max (essentially 1% per 1min).

M1 mac gave insane perceived performance boost - no noticeable throttling. Macbook airs are fully passively cooled, never heard M Macbook pro with fans screeching.

Also real full work day battery doing real work without power adapter at full performance. Cool to touch most of the time.

I made homework for a job in 2020 on a 2013 personal macbook. Apart from memory footprint - I could not feel noticeable difference on development experience. Editing images was frustrating on both. With M macs - its silent, smooth fast.

Number of parallel cores matching best intel cpus on base models, GPU blowing any mobile gpu in price range out of the water with thermal capacity to peg it 100% no problem. Unified memory for those GPUs to do what you could only imagined doing on GPUs that cost 3 times more than the macbook.

It’s a such excellent architecture that yeah - it’s “boring” you can nitpick about M69 Ultra Pro Max performance, but take a base MBP of any M line and it blows almost any laptop out of the water, even to this day.