I don’t agree. Compile times are definitely and very noticeably quicker on my Intel gaming laptop (that’s actually a few years old now) vs my M3 MBP.

That said, I’ve never once felt that the M3 MBPs are sluggish. They are definitely super quick machines. And the fact that I can go a full day without charging even when using moderately heavy workloads is truly jaw droppingly impressive.

I’d definitely take the power performance over that small little extra saved in compile times any day of the week. So Apple have made some really smart judgements there.

M3 vs other high end intel chips on code compilation generally has the higher clock speed always winning. Only with the M4 is starting to hit clock speeds nearer to high end intel chips . We are 2 generations out to probably 5ghz sustained on Apple chips.

In guhidalg's defense, they did say that the "Mac laptops feel faster" (emphasis mine) not that they are faster. There's a trick here with Macs, which is that their user interfaces for the OS and many programs are tightly integrated with the hardware which makes the UI faster--that's the "feel faster"--it's a software, not hardware thing. In cases where the software is equivalent (i.e. cross-platform compilers like GCC/Clang/Cargo) you're going to see little difference, but your OS experience is definitely snappier on Macs.

The arm architecture is also optimized for UI-like tasks, quick to start and stop processes on one of many cores with differing power constraints, whereas x86 is more for workstation-type sustained workloads

I think this has a whole lot to do with the memory throughput, as well as great efficiency.

My M1 still holds right up! It is the smallest RAM model, and even that is not the end of things.

I bought an M1 Max with 64gb of ram at release. I'm still not sure what will get me to replace it other than it simply breaking. Maybe an M5 will finally make me want to buy something new. I'm debating getting a cheaper Air and maybe a base Ultra now that I do most of my heavy work at a desk.

You mean plugged in or battery?

You’ll get regular performance on battery.

I’ve gone entire work days with my Pro on battery because I didn’t notice I hadn’t plugged it in. All my docker containers, IDE etc plugged into my external monitor. It was a good 9hrs before I noticed.

Macs are easy to beat depending on what trade offs you want to make though.