Earlier quoted context omitted.
M2 is still quite far ahead in user-interactive tasks like browser and JVM, as shown by actual user experience in battery life. Cinebench isn't exactly the only efficiency test and Anandtech shows AMD still trailing far behind on the SPEC2017 suite (a variety of real-world applications). In desktops (Mac Studio etc) where you can run unlimited watts, yeah Apple doesn't do as well there, but the efficiency is still am…
I'm not sure if I even trust Intel/Windows at this point. The m1 macs are just so much snappier in absolutely every way imaginable than my old 11th gen Dell. My old PC would some times take minutes (!) to fully wake up from sleep, the battery drained in a couple of hours when coding, and it was sluggish the whole time compared to plugged in performance. I plan to see if I can borrow someone's 13th gen PC and use it f…
It helps that it's Unix on the desktop. If you're comparing against a Windows install then I'm sure yes it will be way snappier, if you're comparing against Linux it really shouldn't be. Linux doesn't always have powersaving down quite right etc though, ofc.
The sales pitch of OS X to powerusers imo is that it's Unix on the desktop that is well-supported by the vendor and has a good ecosystem of professionally made apps. If you want to tinker there's nothing inherently bad about Linux either, but OS X actually does just work fairly well, although it's not without flaws as well. But it's faster than Windows, less amateur than Linux, actually has a user base unlike BSD. So it sits in an interesting spot - the "willing to spend money" niche.
There are a number of downsides and unpleasant aspects to OS X too, of course. But yeah, it's inherently going to be snappier than Windows if that's your reference point, *nix generally is, that's not OSX exclusive either.
People are generally more hostile to vendor hardware-software integration today than they used to be in the past, I think. Amiga, BeOS, SGI, HP-UX, Solaris, Cray, Nonstop, zSystem, CUDA... there is a lot of the computing world that runs on proprietary hardware-software integration and always has.
It has been an interesting sea change that people see open/plays nice as the default, it's an interesting sign of how copyleft has won in the long term that proprietary is seen as greedy/suspicious in general. I've been feeling that's a significant thing for a while. People are hostile to these products when sometimes it's simply paying more for a specific thing or a niche, if you want a premium *nix laptop the M1s are very nice actually.