The first computer I used was a Pentium Pro 233mhz and I remembered how fast things were moving every year for at least a decade before it slowed to irrelevance. The M1 was long time coming. I remember back in 2013 when the iPhone 5S came out, Anandtech showed how it matched Atom's perf in a few web benchmarks at much lower power. Combined that with mw level idle power, it was obvious they would be very competitive in the pc space. That was also the year Apple called their chip "desktop level." I remember thinking back then how amazing I could FaceTime for hours on a passively cooled phone but yet can barely Skype for thirty seconds before the fan spin up on my Mac. Always thought it was the smaller screen, never made the connection it was the SoC that was the key difference.