> all Apple Silicon machines will have this kind of hardware backed into the SoC at no extra cost whereas no Intel system (be it PC or Mac) will. First of all,

> all Apple Silicon machines will have this kind of hardware backed into the SoC at no extra cost whereas no Intel system (be it PC or Mac) will. First of all, adding this hardware encoder to the Apple Silicon chips definetly has a cost, and you pay it when you buy their products. Second, there are Intel CPUs available with hardware encoders (google Intel QuickSync). The only difference is that you can choose to not pay for it if you don't need it.