I want long battery life, no fans and a lot of memory. Running Linux. If M1 is the catalyst to make it happen, then so be it.
The more we enable people who are unwilling to even try to learn that this particular option has moved from the Edit menu to the Format menu, or has removed the default toolbar icon (but you can add one), or has simply moved an inch to the left, the more we send the message that it's normal and expected that people shouldn't have to ever adapt and change and learn new things.
One big example of that is the removal of community captioning for YouTube videos. Call me hidebound but I am not happy at all with this, even though I don't use it very much. Captions are critical for making videos accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing communities. The removal of this feature is an ugly snub to a vulnerable group. Now they will be wholly reliant on the video creators to do the captioning themselves or otherwise be stuck with the lousy automatic captioning.
There is a balance to be struck, and between us, I think we've more or less bracketed it.
Backwards compatibility has long been a Microsoft obsession (out of necessity for the enterprise market) and an Apple allergy.
"I'm going to dump Apple over this!"
"See ya. Don't let the door hit you on the way out!."
Of course optical drives; that was a big step.
Apple is ruthless at pruning old tech.
AMD has been great (and improving) on performance/watt. It appears that the M1 has the upper hand, but then again Apple bought all the 5nm capacity for the year. I'm really curious how well 5nm Zen chips would compete non performance/watt - I suspect Zen 4 (5nm) will compete very favorably.
I believe I read an article the other day that explained why the M1 was so fast and efficient and basically the design it came up with is impossible to do on Intel, for many reasons including the fact that Intel instructions are variable-length (which means they need to be completely parsed every time to find the end of the instruction) while M1 instructions are fixed-length (which means you don't need to parse it) due to the RISC design (finally a winner).
Methinks we are witnessing the death of the traditional Intel chip API as the bad design decisions made along the way come to a head.
Should make things interesting as now both Apple and Linux have a head start on ARM support.
Really the bigger issue is that the ARM chips Windows has thus far run on don't have the similar TSO opts the M1 came with.
(The instruction decoder would become more of a translator.)
The bigger problem with x86 is the implicit hard synchronization barrier after most writes. This cannot be easily fixed without introducing new instructions altogether.
(also, even if it were about on M1, Linus said he thinks its unlikely, other qualified people disagree)