Newer Intel Panther Lake chips perform the same or very similarly on battery as they do when plugged in - as do Qualcomm chips. However, I don't know where they're seeing "consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops". Multi-core performance can definitely beat M5 in some configurations but single core performance is still fairly far behind and battery life is comparable again depending on the exact specifications and design of the laptop. I've seen analysis showing M5 is still the perf/watt king though regardless of configurations.

Sorry, poor wording. It's the Neo that's on the bottom in many reviews, but the M5 is regularly beaten by Windows laptops. My usage of "consistently" was in the sense of regularly beaten, not in the sense of always beaten.

So…inconsistently?

So consistently beats the M5 on something, just not on everything.

Have you tried Panther Lake or Wildcat Lake laptops?

Jesus, they're still calling their chips Lake? As in Skylake? As in 2012?

Jesus, why does it matter? Don't you still have your name since birth? How lame!

They keep the legacy processing of content around. But the originating teams and founders are long gone.

Because the naming convention was used for chips based on Skylake microarchitecture (but with other differences such as process node). Not changing the name implies they've either changed the naming convention (why?) or they haven't improved the microarchitecture since 2012.

>they haven't improved the microarchitecture since 2012.

No, but they did beat 14nm like a dead horse for almost a decade. So you're not that far off.

Apple also is faster when plugged in

Citation needed. I've owned Apple laptops for many years - and I'm a video editor (amongst other things). If this is the case it's new behaviour.

This is a difference between selecting Highest or Automatic for performance under the battery menu item.