With Nvidia Now I can even play games on it, though I wouldn't recommend it for any serious gamers.
And at the shop we are doing technology refreshes for the whole dev team upgrading them to M4s. I was asked if I wanted to upgrade my M1 Pro to an M4, and I said no. Mainly because I don't want to have to move my tooling over to a new machine, but I am not bottlenecked by anything on my current M1.
I need to point this out all the time these days it seems, but this opinion is only valid if all you use is a laptop and all you care about is single core perfomance.
The computing world is far bigger than just laptops.
Big music/3d design/video editing production suites etc still benefit much more from having workstation PCs with higher PCI bandwidth, more lanes for multiple SSDs and GPUs, and high level multicore processing performance which cannot be matched by Apple silicon.
For studio movies, render farms are usually Linux but I think many workstation tasks are done on Apple machines. Or is that no longer true?
Another bonus is that the MBP can drive high impedance headphones on the go, without needing an external audio interface.
It also helps that Logic was popular for awhile, and Pro Tools (the OG DAW) was a Mac thing, though Ableton overall is more popular these days.
On the video side Vegas Pro is used in a lot of production houses, and it does not run on Apple Silicon at all.
Add to that the fact that most of the audio interfaces were firewire and plug and play on mac and a real struggle on windows. With windows you also had to deal with ASIO, and once you picked your audio interface it has to be used for both inputs and outputs (still to this day) forcing you to compound interfaces with workarounds like Asio4All if you wanted to use different interfaces, while Mac os just lets you pick different interfaces for input and output
Linux had very interesting projects, unfortunately music production relies on a lot of expensive audio plugins that a lot of time come in installers and are a pain in the butt to use through proton/wine, when it's possible at all. That means that doing music production on Linux means possibly not using plugins you paid and not finding alternatives to them. It's a shame because I'd love to be able to only use Linux
With Apple removing Firewire support this Fall, and so many devices still plugging along in so many studios, I wonder what's going to happen this fall.
When I was at music college doing production courses, they exclusively taught Cubase on windows.
I guess I'd slightly change that to "MacBook" or similar, as Apple are top-in-class when it comes to laptops, but for desktop they seem to not even be in the fight anymore, unless reducing power consumption is your top concern. But if you're aiming for "performance per money spent", there isn't really any alternative to non-Apple hardware.
I do agree they do the best hardware in terms of feeling though, which is important for laptops. But computing is so much larger than laptops, especially if you're always working in the same place everyday (like me).
I'm working in IT and I get all new machines for our company over my desk to check them, and I observed the exact same points as the OP.
The new machines are either fast and loud and hot and with poor battery life, or they are slow and "warm" and have moderate battery life.
But I had no business laptop yet, ARM, AMD, or Intel, which can even compete with the M1 Air, not to speak of the M3 Pro! Not to speak about all the issues with crappy Lenovo docks, etc.
It doesn’t matter if I install Linux or Windows. The funny point is that some of my colleagues have ordered a MacBook Air or Pro and use their Windows or Linux and a virtual machine via Parallels.
Think about it: Windows 11 or Linux in a VM is even faster, snappier, more silent, and has even longer battery life than these systems native on a business machine from Lenovo, HP, or Dell.
Well, your mileage may vary, but IMHO there is no alternative to a Mac nowadays, even if you want to use Linux or Windows.