That said, it’s important to keep this all in perspective: We’re talking about a neglible difference in overall speeds on some benchmarks—a gap most people will never notice in everyday use.
Disagree, having used both side by side. Chrome is much faster and will only get batter. That's 90% of most people's use case and the new M1 version of chrome has a negligible impact on battery life - that's how they've nearly doubled the battery life compared to existing Intel MacBooks. That says nothing for those who wish to use Safari - not even close to compare the two - the M1 is miles ahead on both performance and battery life.
If you're inclined to be CPU intensive, the rendering of 4K video files was much faster on M1 Final Cut than Intel based Final Cut, and even the M1 MacBook Air was equal (or close) enough to my Intel Core i5 MacBook Pro to 4K rendering in Adobe Premiere. Remember, the MacBook Air does not have a fan, competing against a Machine that does...
Intel is in big trouble here as they cannot produce the same computing power ATM without increasing power draw. This has been a problem for them for at least the last 5 years and why Apple took thing into their own hands.
But going back to what you quoted, it's also why I said to wait until Gen2 of the M1 comes out. By then most apps will be M1 compatible (as opposed to being emulated through Rosetta 2) and the performance increases will be that much better and this won't even be a debate any longer.
