Depends on your metric. A fan makes noise, attracts dirt that needs cleaning, needs more space ...
I really love my fanless devices, even though they never will reach the speed of activly cooled ones.
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cpu_performance_...
What do we see at the top of this chart? TSMC 3nm (M3/M4), followed by TSMC 4nm (Ryzen 7000U/8000U), TSMC 5nm (M1/M2), TSMC 5nm/6nm mixed (Ryzen 7000H), and then finally we find something made on an Intel process node instead of TSMC.
The efficiency has more to do with the process node than which architecture it is.
It's too bad they don't have Epyc on that chart. Epyc 9845 is on TSMC N3E and that thing is running cores at a >2GHz base clock at less than 2.5W per core.
And this benchmark doesn't even include M4, which is even more efficient.
Your link is comparing the M3 against AMD chips with higher TDPs. Higher TDPs tank "single-core efficiency" because power consumption is non-linear with clock speed. Give a core near its limit three times the power budget and you're basically dividing the single-core efficiency by three because you burn three times more power and barely improve single-thread performance at all, and then that's exactly what you see there.
To have a useful comparison you have to compare the efficiency of CPUs when they're set to use the same amount of power.
The number of manufacturers or the number of people? Apple was on the path to laptop irrelevancy before the M series, it doesn't seem clear to me at all that people don't care about noise and heat along with performance.
Performance along which characteristics? How much performance does one need locally? At which point does heat/noise/energy cost become too much for a mobile workstation?
All of these are additional criteria that the M series laptops competes in (and in many cases wins), even amongst programmers who are some of the most compute performance sensitive consumers out there.
What that really determines is multi-thread performance. Fanless laptop that can dissipate the power of one core? No problem. Fanless laptop that can dissipate the power of all the cores? For that you have to lower the clock speed quite a bit. Which is why you see AMD chips on older TSMC process nodes getting better multithread performance than Apple's fanless ones.
The cost/benefit ratio of adding a fan is extremely attractive. The alternative way of doing it is to add more cores. If you have 8 fanless cores at 2 GHz, how do you improve multi-thread performance by 50%? Option one, clock them at 3 GHz, but now you need a fan; cost of fan ~$5. Option two, get 16 cores and cap them at 1.5 GHz to fit in the same power envelope, but now you need twice as much silicon, cost of twice as many cores $500+.
The number of people who pick the second option given that trade off is so small that hardly anybody even bothers to offer it.
Apple continues to do it because a) then they get to claim "see, they can't do this?" even when hardly anybody chooses that given the option, and b) then if you actually want the higher performance one from them, you're paying hundreds of dollars extra for more cores instead of $5 extra for the same one but with a fan in it.