M series mac's are my dream c++ development machines. Just this week I was investigating some potential bugs in Qt's javascript engine and I was recompiling it from source across multiple tags to bisect. On my i9 mac I would compile Qt overnight, on my m3 pro it takes about 10 minutes, on battery, silently. Truly remarkable.
The amount of cooling and power required for such a PC versus the aluminum slab with small fans that almost never turn on is a testament to the insanely good engineering of the M series chips.
I compile large c++ codebases on a daily basis, but the M3 Max never makes me feel like I can “grab a cup of coffee”.