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Actually it’s not irrelevant. Lots of people choose between a Mac and Windows and the M chips up the competitive pressure on Intel and AMD to improve their offerings.

My workplace gave me a choice between an M1 Macbook or an Intel-based Lenovo. Even though I'd never used a Mac full-time before, it was a no-brainer and I picked the Macbook. It absolutely does matter.

This is the argument Apple fans used to make during the PowerPC G4 days – “it doesn’t matter that Intel makes faster CPUs, because I can’t buy a Mac with them, so the comparison is irrelevant and not worth looking at”. Except, over time, it did matter as sales bled off to Windows machines.

Yeah, the OS matters, but it isn’t the only thing that matters to most people (and with the web, the loss-of-applications cost of switching your OS is a lot lower than it used to be).

Apple has set a high benchmark. AMD, Intel, Qualcomm and Microsoft are under pressure and have plans for M1 competitor.

Lots of Windows users migrating to Mac for performance reasons