I remember the hype around the first M1 and getting one and it actually living up to the hype! It was compiling code twice as fast as the MBP I replaced and was booting way faster and was generally snappier in every way. I ran through lots of benchmarks but also tested on my own code. It was faster than the beefy servers I deployed to.
But the absolute biggest game changer was that it was silent. Completely silent. Hadn’t realised how noisy computers had been until then.
I dipped my toes in the water with literally the cheapest M1 I could buy…the base model Mac Mini was on sale for $499 so I sort of impulse bought it to see if it could replace my PC. I was blown away by the performance of this tiny little machine, even with just 8GB of RAM. I’ve since went all in with a M3 Pro MacBook Pro and its performance and battery life are insane. M1 and beyond definitely live up to the hype.
i was as impressed by gaming. being able to run a triple a game like resident evil 4 with everything turned to max on a mac laptop was something new to me.
It's a shame there's still so few high-end games to flex the hardware. Publishers interest in doing Mac ports is still almost zero, as I understand it the Death Stranding and Resident Evil ports only happened because Apple bankrolled them so they'd have something to show off at their hardware launches.
It wasn't always zero, Apple had always advertised videogame potential of Macs for decades while working hard not to realize it. Irony is it had lead to softcore porn lootbox games replacing videogames.
I've had good success with that on my M2 mini, just installed Steam inside it and then let it do its thing behind the scenes.
The only hard failure I've hit (admittedly with a small sample size) was The Talos Principle, which has an intel Mac version that won't run on the M2, and running through Whisky immediately errored as well.
It doesn’t. The number of games that natively target Vulkan are minuscule.
Both Unity and Unreal support metal well (and for a long time, better than Vulkan), especially due to iOS. Even many proprietary engines do.
Even before Vulkan and Metal existed, OpenGL was consistent (before Apple stopped supporting it) and there weren’t many more native games then either.
Someone will no doubt bring up reusing Proton, but they’ll gloss over the differences in platform and also that Game Porting Toolkit exists and does the same thing.
The reality is that, until recently, the number of Mac systems that were gaming ready was a very small number that wasn’t worth focusing on.
If you really cared you could get fanless PCs. A few of the Surface Pro models have been fanless. I had a gorgeous fanless Xiaomi Mi book that had virtually no branding. Basically any fanless PC post SSD introduction are just as silent. From what I've heard some of Apple's newer MBPs with fans can get noisy under load too, particularly the 14".
I wouldn't call my ThinkPad P14s AMD gen whatever loud either. The fan will spin up when multiple cores are under heavy load but compared to the 2018 MBP it replaced it's essentially silent.
You can make a pretty silent desktop (more space for heat pipes and large cooling blocks). But I had a Lenovo laptop that was recommended during a Linux excursion and it was loud as well, getting the M1 Air after that was bliss.
I think it'll be a long time until we see an inflection point like that [1].
I also had a Ryzen 3700X, high-end CPU and case fans to make it somewhat quiet under load. Then I got the MacBook Air M1, which was as fast in multi-core use, but felt much faster in daily use to much better single thread performance (turns out that large builds spend quite some time on portions where everything blocks on one unit and the amount of parallelism is 1). And it was completely quiet (no fan).
The Air M1 felt like magic at the time, I could have the power of the 3700X on the train and insanely long battery life.
[1] That said, I got an M3 Pro for work and my private laptop has an M1 Pro and the difference in single-thread performance is certainly noticeable.
But the absolute biggest game changer was that it was silent. Completely silent. Hadn’t realised how noisy computers had been until then.