Yes it is and the difference isn't understated, I think everyone knows by now that Apple has run away with laptop/desktop performance. They're just leagues ahead.

It's a mix of better CPUs, better OS design (e.g. much less need for aggressive virus scanners), a faster filesystem, less corporate meddling, high end SSDs by default... a lot of things.

Qualcomm CPUs outperform Apple now, Apple was just early and had exclusivity for manufacturing 3nm at TSMC.

I use Windows alongside my Mac Mini, and I would say they perform pretty similarly (but M-chip is definitely more power efficient).

I don't use Slack, but I don't think anything takes 20 seconds for me. Maybe XCode, but I don't use it often enough to be annoyed.

I have an i9 windows machine with 64GB ram and an M1 Mac. I’d say day to day responsiveness the Mac is heads and tails above the windows machine, although getting worse. I’m not sure if the problem is the arm electron apps are getting slower or if my machine is just aging

It's Windows. I'm on Linux 99% of the time and it's significantly more responsive on hardware from 2014 than Windows is on a high end desktop from 2023. I'm not being dramatic.

(Yes, I've tried all combinations of software to hardware and accounted for all known factors, it's not caused by viruses or antiviruses).

XP was the last really responsive Microsoft OS, it went downhill from then and never recovered.

My current machine I upgraded from win10 to win11 and I noticed an across the board overnight regression in everything. I did a clean install so if anything it should have been quicker but boot times, app launch times, compile times all took a nosedive on that update.

I still think there’s a lot of blame to go around for the “kitchen sink” approach to app development where we have entire OS’s that can boot faster than your app can get off a splash screen.

Unfortunately, my users are on windows and work has no Linux vpn client so a switch isn’t happening any time soon.

Most likely the engineers at many startups only use apple computers themselves and therefore only optimize performance for those systems. It's a shame but IMO result of their incompetence and not result of some magic apple performance gains.