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You don't need an arm processor, many modern x86 chips match or outcompete m series on power efficiency and performance. Mainly lunar lake gen 1 and the new gen 3 (arrow lake not really).

The efficiency of arm chips was never arm, really, it was the manufacturing node and SOC design. Well, Intel and AMD can make SOCs, and they do.

[_ph_]

There are reasons beyond pure power efficiency to use ARM processors. It is a nice architecture to work with, especially if you plan to write low-level code. Also, you might want to deploy on ARM servers.

Also, there is the question who in general makes Laptops as nice as a MB Air? Who makes a fan less laptop of roughly comparable power?

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If you're writing true low-level code then you're most likely doing it for performance reasons, like ffmpeg. But ARM doesn't have the instruction set to make the best use of that, x86 does with its extensions. Otherwise, the compiler handles translation, so there's just no reason for you to care about the assembly unless you're writing assembly.

As for nice laptops, I think Asus and Lenovo makes some nice ones. I don't believe any are fanless, but most are quiet - Lunar Lake gen 3 is an SOC with a base TDP of 25 watts, and it can even go down to 15 watts. These CPUs are slightly faster in multi-core performance than M4, and they use similar wattage. I believe the Asus zenbook duo gets better battery life by a wide margin because of the 99 watt-hour battery. They still fall a little short of M5 in performance, but it's very close.

As for servers, it's a good point. But I think currently most servers are still using x86 CPUs, so it might not be relevant for a while.

[_ph_]

ARM servers definitely seem to get more popular. Seems that for a lot of tasks they are the more economic option. Consequently, you want more and more development for ARM. That would be one reason. The other is, that developing for ARM is more fun, whenever you touch parts which are architecture-dependent.

For the computer: the Air is a great laptop. I am very happy it doesn't have a fan, so it can never get a clogged fan and it works great. Currently, I am running Linux on it via VMWare, so I get the best of two worlds. And Linux really flies on it. Once it is no longer supported by macOS, I am certainly going to go native Linux. As it is an M2, that probably would work already today.