> If Apple had been at the forefront of Intel CPUs, the transition would have looked like a slight loss in performance for tremendous increases in battery life

> If Apple had been at the forefront of Intel CPUs, the transition would have looked like a slight loss in performance for tremendous increases in battery life which most would have been happy with. The M1 launched two months after the first Intel Tiger Lake processors, so Apple was pretty much on-time for moving the 13" MacBook Pro off of Intel's Ice Lake, and it wasn't behind on performance: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i7-1185g7-vs-apple-m1#benchmarks https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i7-1185g7-v... The larger MacBook Pro was later moving off Intel and was using a very old (2.5 years) Intel CPU at the time the M1 Pro and M1 Max launched, but even comparing against the CPUs Intel had at the time for machines of that class, the M1 Pro's performance looks fine: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i9-11900h-vs-apple-m1-pro#benchmarks https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i9-11900h-v... And it's important to note that Intel themselves were largely to blame for the fact that the larger MacBook Pro was still using a 2.5 year old CPU: Intel never shipped Ice Lake processors for desktop or high-power mobile, so the Coffee Lake Refresh processors didn't have a successor from Intel until five months before the M1 Pro and M1 Max launched.