I can compare a relatively fresh (no full development environment yet, though with Xcode and VS Code in remote mode) M1 16GB MBP with heavily used (tons of Safa

I can compare a relatively fresh (no full development environment yet, though with Xcode and VS Code in remote mode) M1 16GB MBP with heavily used (tons of Safari and Firefox tabs, VS Code with full local Node/TS dev setup) 15" 2019 32GB +4GB Radeon GPU MBP with Catalina. Did not run any benchmarks, so this is subjective and anecdotal. Perceived performance in light use (browsing, content consumption, light Web development) feels roughly the same, though I may be holding the M1 machine to a slightly higher standard. Memory usage as reported by iPulse hovers around 60% on the former and 40% on the latter. Battery life of the former beats the latter (from memory, that Intel machine was never really able to sustain more than 5-6 hours of use).