> I don't know what niche you're referring to. Apple Silicon are the sole occupants of a "niche," delivering high performance with excellent processing per Watt.
You clearly do know what niche I'm referring to, since you just described it. Like you say: Apple's laptops are the sole occupants of their niche, so what would you even compare against? I'm sure there are other ARM chips out there with comparable or better "performance" per Watt, but Apple Silicon's pretty unique right now in maximizing the "performance" half of that equation instead of minimizing the "per Watt" half.
> When shopping for a laptop, there's nothing unfair about comparing ones with different processor architectures when they all can run the software needed.
I never said it was "unfair". I said it was meaningless - because it is. There are myriad metrics by which one could evaluate "performance" (per Watt or otherwise), and Apple Silicon doesn't necessarily win at all of them.
When other manufacturers start putting out ARM laptops targeting the same (or at least remotely similar) performance metrics as a Macbook targets, then there'd be a worthwhile discussion to be had.