The 8GB Macbook Air at $899 educational is faster, and will feel faster, than any laptop that anyone has owned or thought of owning at that price point.
Millions of buyers who need laptops for *-at-home activities will sing its performance praises on Sheets and Salesforce.
The "I need 16GB crowd" of content creators need more RAM and GPU but they are a tiny fraction of the market for laptops.
MS Office apps, for example, are horrifically unresponsive on Macs. Switching the ribbon to a new view has 700-1000ms of lag on my 2.4 GHz i5. Maybe an M1 brings it to 350ms. Once MS developers start developing on an M1 laptop, the developers will change code, and it will slow down, and until it gets slower than it currently is, the code will not be optimized.
This is what I mean about software being like a gas rather than a liquid. Any new CPU performance will be consumed by developers because their threshold for performance optimization changes with each new performance improvement.
If they were ever going to be fast, they would already be fast. They are a software problem unto their own.
I think there are two routes to making software faster for users: 1) intense education of developers and rewarding them properly for keeping software responsive, and 2) only letting them develop on 5-10 year old hardware. I'm not really sure 1) would work with many teams, but I'm pretty sure 2) would.
The average Joe user just uses a browser and something like Spotify. Even most word processing by college students is in Google Docs now - very few people I knew bought MS Office for their Macs when I was in college 5 years ago, even with a $99 student license through the school.
Developers will use all available resources until their is pressure to be more efficient. This is not a critique of developers, this is the nature of software. Unless critical development time is spent making sure that software is responsive, it will only ever have barely acceptable performance.
Which is why new, faster CPUs have very little effect on users. Any performance gains will be gobbled up by new software frameworks that promise better use of developer time, but which may come at an absolutely tremendous cost of UI responsiveness.
Spotify, Slack, Office on Mac, hyper complex JavaScript web frameworks... all will continue to take more and more CPU cycles that are available.
I think that for consumer products, which these are targeting, software responsiveness, usability, and battery lifetime are by far the most important metrics.
These chips help with battery, and can hell with software responsiveness if there's is developer focus on it.
But what will probably happen is that development teams will buy the fastest computers they can, and then develop software that is mostly, somewhat adequately performing on this beefy hardware, then ship it to customers that are on weaker hardware.
This effect is especially pronounced for web software, where it's easier to make unresponsive interactions due to so many layers of software, especially with developer network connections usually being 10x-100x less latency than users.