I'm in marketing now, and really my day consists of zoom calls and tons of safari and chrome tabs, with a bunch of corporate security shit running in background. Not very power user. Last 3 years I've been on an i5 16gb MBP which was slow as balls. Borderline unusable, fan on the entire day like a jet engine, and if I have a couple of heavy tabs open with pivots, it'll start stalling and affecting my video and audio.
Just got upgraded to a base 14" MBP Pro with M1, and it's night and day. I don't think I've crested 50% CPU, which is when the screensaver kicks in over 3 screens when I'm AFK. My old laptop, I'd be averaging 80% CPU all day, and 100% with screen saver kicking in running at 5fps lol. I have yet to hear the fan kick in, my home office feels so silent now.
I know lots of you aren't Mac users, but fuck Intel chips haha. Guess that doesn't help my FS thread for my old i5 MBP.
edit - I think a lot of the problems with Intel cpus on laptops is throttling. Once the fan kicks in, and it starts throttling, you're losing 30% performance and it just snowballs from there.
edit 2 - talking to some of my engineering coworkers who use enough VMs to be stuck on Intel CPUs, their top of the like i9 Intel CPUs suffer from he same issues when it gets hot.