It’s all of the above. One thing Apple excels at is actually using their hardware and software together whereas the PC world has a long history of one of the companies like Intel, Microsoft, or the actual manufacturer trying to make things better but failing to get the others on-board. You can in 2025 find people who disable power management because they were burned (hopefully not literally) by some combination of vendors slacking on QA!
One good example of this is RAM. Apple Silicon got some huge wins from lower latency and massive bandwidth, but that came at the cost of making RAM fixed and more expensive. A lot of PC users scoffed at the default RAM sizes until they actually used one and realized it was great at ~8GB less than the equivalent PC. That’s not magic or because Apple has some super elite programmers, it’s because they all work at the same company and nobody wants to go into Tim Cook’s office and say they blew the RAM budget and the new Macs need to cost $100 more. The hardware has compression support and the OS and app teams worked together to actually use it well, whereas it’s very easy to imagine Intel adding the feature but skimping on speed / driver stability, or Microsoft trying to implement it but delaying release for a couple years, or not working with third-party developers to optimize usage, etc. – nobody acting in bad faith but just what inevitably happens when everyone has different incentives.