Heat is also a downside when you have to carry it between meeting rooms.
A silent/cool laptop is highly preferred over something that does maybe 5% faster.
In the case of Apple’s M series you get both. Other laptops (gram) may be lighter but the silent/cool/fast is a winning combo for me.
How much of that is the problem of the SW?
If you look at Teams when it’s running, it’s not like it’s maxing out a CPU core or anything. It’s just that many laptops are pitifully bad.
That, and apple has a 3 year lead on chip manufacturing side. I moved from M1 MacBook Pro a same size Lenovo with Ryzen 6800h and I cannot tell the difference speed wise. Noise wise, too. It's not even a Zen 4 CPU
Honestly shitty SW should get slapped with an environmental TAX just like motor vehicles. I remember running Skype video calls and Pidgin chats in ~2005 on a 1.2 GHz single core CPU with 512MB of RAM.
I can exert some influence in my choice of hardware.