I'm by no means an apple fan boy (I only have an air) but the apple m processors are getting faster every gen. My m1 air is fast, has a nice design, great battery life, nice screen, etc. idk what else I would want in a laptop. Obviously not a cheap but it should last me a lot longer than whatever pc I would have gotten for half the price.

I don't follow the laptop industry closely though so maybe I'm being ripped off without realizing it?

My biggest issue is thermals and build quality.

Feels like macbooks need every square mm of aluminium surface area hence less ports, as they barely manage to not reach autoignition temperature. Likewise plenty laptops with metal shells seem to use them as their ground, being too cheap for one tiny wire, and hence the case will slowly retain charge over a long day and you get this weird scratchy/jittery feeling when touching the case. Because ground is haaaaard.

And such shit in laptops costing thousands of euros. Fuck.

I'm usually happy with increased efficiency as it represents an increase in performance in the future. Cost is something that seems much more inevitable to go down than performance is to go up, so the two metrics I look for in the state of the CPU market are peak single core performance and performance per watt. Of course, this only applies to observing the industry from outside, I'm sure if I was actually in the market for a new CPU right now I'd probably be happier with a worse performance per watt chip as long as it was cheaper.