You say that as if Apple hasn’t been delivering yearly performance improvements in their SoCs like clockwork. They’ve roughly tripled the performance in the last five years between the A9 and A14.
AMD has done a great job with Zen 3 in particular, but IMO they are going to really struggle to compete with what Apple is able to do with ARM.
Dunno, the zen 3 cores are pretty competitive with the M1. Sure they use more power, so you'll need to make do with somewhat larger batteries and somewhat smaller runtimes. The performance/core is pretty similar, even if the M1 has the edge. I'd rather have a zen 5000 APU (due at CES in Jan), 32GB ram, and a 12 hour battery life and be able to run linux than a M1, 16GB ram, and 20 hour life and only be able to run OSX.
Similar the Intel NUC like AMD products are hitting, I expect them to be pretty attractive with the zen 3 APUs.
Sure I'd buy an M1, just not sure I want to switch to OSX, even the cut/paste inconsistencies drive me batty.
AMD has done a great job with Zen 3 in particular, but IMO they are going to really struggle to compete with what Apple is able to do with ARM.