The Apple Silicon chassis was allowed to finally house an appropriate cooling solution, too. They are much quieter than the same Intel laptops when dissipating the same power levels.
Apple’s power efficiency was a great bump forward, but the performance claims were a little exaggerated. I love my Apple Silicon devices but I still switch over to a desktop for GPU work because it’s so much faster, for example.
Apple had that famously misleading chart where they showed their M1 GPU keeping pace with a flagship nVidia card that misled everyone at launch. In practice they’re not even close to flagship desktop accelerators, unfortunately.
They have excellent idle power consumption though. Great for a laptop.