The sum of a large number of small engineering improvements, coupled with a lot of component integration detail work, topped off by some very shrewd supply chai

The sum of a large number of small engineering improvements, coupled with a lot of component integration detail work, topped off by some very shrewd supply chain arrangements. I think you precisely have it. There is no single magic reason the M1 is so good, just a lot of things coming together. They start with a better instruction set than x86, have of course the best process available, and perhaps the largest part, they have built up an increadible team over a decade. And they are extremely focussed in what they target. If anything, that is Apples "magic". They are not making a chip which is built in an abstract manner to be sold to random customers. They have exactly their needs in mind and execute towards those. In a sense AMD did that with the chips for the Playstation/XBox. Like the M1 it is basically a SOC. There optimized for great graphics performance. Unfortunately, those chips are not sold separately for building your own PC.