I recently upgraded from an M1 mac book pro 15", which I was pretty happy with, to the M4 max pro 16". I've been extremely impressed with the new laptop. The key metric I use to judge performance is build speed for our main project. It's a thing I do a few dozen times per day. The M1 took about four minutes to run our integration tests. I should add that those tests run in parallel and make heavy use of docker. There are close to 300 integration tests and a few unit tests. Each of those hit the database, Redis, and Elasticsearch. The M4 Pro dropped that to 40 seconds. Each individual test might take a few seconds. It seems to be benefiting a lot from both the faster CPU with lots of cores and the increased amount of memory and memory bandwidth. Whatever it is, I'm seriously impressed with this machine. It costs a lot new but on a three year lease, it boils down to about 100 euros per month. Totally worth it for me. And I'm kind of kicking myself for not upgrading earlier.
Before the M1, I was stuck using an intel core i5 running arch linux. My intel mac managed to die months before the M1 came out. Let's just say that the M1 really made me appreciate how stupidly slow that intel hardware is. I was losing lots of time doing builds. The laptop would be unusable during those builds.
Life is too short for crappy hardware. From a software point of view, I could live with Linux but not with Windows. But the hardware is a show stopper currently. I need something that runs cool and yet does not compromise on performance. And all the rest (non-crappy trackpad, amazingly good screen, cool to the touch, good battery life, etc.). And manages to look good too. I'm not aware of any windows/linux laptop that does not heavily compromise on at least a few of those things. I'm pretty sure I can get a fast laptop. But it'd be hot and loud and have the unusable synaptics trackpad. And a mediocre screen. Etc. In short, I'd be missing my mac.
Apple is showing some confidence by just designing a laptop that isn't even close to being cheap. This thing was well over 4K euros. Worth every penny. There aren't a lot of intel/amd laptops in that price class. Too much penny pinching happening in that world. People think nothing of buying a really expensive car to commute to work. But they'll cut on the thing that they use the whole day when they get there. That makes no sense whatsoever in my view.