Maybe the gaming part.

To the extent that games are made available for MacOS/ARM in the first place (admittedly a sticking point), it looks like these machines will be able to play most of them reasonably well. Certainly much better than most of Apples previous machines with integrated graphics or low end discrete GPUs.

iOS games/apps run on Apple Silicon Mac, so that by itself opens up a huge gaming market.

Casual gaming market.

In other words, the biggest gaming market.

Maybe, but distinct from real "gaming".

A game is a game. There is no "real gaming". Apple Arcade with a Xbox controller paired to a Mac is actually a fun gaming device for some types of gamers.

Genshin Impact is a great game that is on iOS in addition to "real consoles". Oceanhorn 2 is an amazing game that was originally on Apple Arcade and brought to Nintendo's "real console".

There is also quite a number of ports that I think you aren't aware of.

There is a difference between Tetris on Facebook versus Dota or CSGO on PC. The later is "real gaming", the former not. The border might be a gradient.

It's like calling yourself a programmer because you can set a timer on your VCR. (dated but still accurate)

And since when CSGO is a GPU-demanding game?

You think "real games" are for "hard triers only", but it's just your point of view.

Mine and many others. Rightfully so, see the example.

GPU was not the issue here.

umm there are more ports than you think.

I work on multiple OSX machines, servers run linux, and i have a single windows machine just got the few games that can't be run elsewhere.

If porting IOS games is easy then gaming for most people shouldn't be an issue.

I feel like the demand for desktop versions of simple phone games is pretty low.

Mac users who hope to play anything from their steam library or dual boot Windows are going to be very disappointed.

> Although I personally care about every point you listed, I don’t think most buyers care about any of them.

Buyers don't especially care about performance either to be honest, unless they care about one of those factors in order to need it.

Consumers absolutely care that their Apple MacBook Pro has 20 hours of battery life, when the comparable XPS has only 10 hours or whatever.

The ROI for battery life falls off at a certain point, right? For phones, it's probably about a day -- how often is it a problem to plug in your phone at some point in a 24-hour period? -- and for laptops it's often about a full workday, 8-10 hours. I'm not saying that a 20-hour laptop battery isn't an incredible accomplishment, but I do think that I care a lot less about 20 vs 10 hours than I do about 10 vs 5.

And then sit at a desk all day within reach of a power socket

This. The amount of times I've truly needed more then a couple of hours of battery life are rare. I think most people think they want more battery life when they really don't need it. Just add more cooling to stop those processors from throttling all the time.