When Apple announced the M1 chip in 2020, the conversation in our industry was about benchmarks — twice as fast as the previous Intel MacBook Pro at a quarter of the power draw, etc. The benchmarks were impressive, and also slightly beside the point. What we've seen at the businesses we support, four years in, is that Apple Silicon changed what a laptop is for. The kind of work that used to require a desktop tower, a powerful cloud workstation, or a separate render machine now happens on the laptop. The team that used to need three machines per person now needs one.
The practical effects compound. Editors can run Final Cut Pro on a 14-inch MacBook Pro and never feel the limit. Software engineers can run their full local development stack — multiple containers, a database, a few Node processes — without the laptop's fan ever turning on. Finance and ops folks have batteries that last all day, which sounds banal until you watch how it changes meeting culture: people stop hoarding outlets in conference rooms, start moving around, work where they want to work. The hardware fades into the background, which is the highest compliment you can pay a laptop.
The deployment math is also better than it looks. Apple Silicon Macs have held their resale value remarkably well, which means the total cost of ownership over a three-year lifecycle is often within striking distance of comparable Windows hardware — and the productivity gain swamps the difference. Combine that with macOS's lower support cost per device (less malware exposure, simpler MDM workflows, native Unix tooling for engineers), and the business case writes itself for any business whose primary work is knowledge work.
We're not Apple evangelists. There are still good reasons to be on Windows or Linux: specific industrial software, gaming-adjacent workloads, the rare custom build requirement. For everyone else — the design firm, the consulting practice, the SaaS company, the marketing agency — Apple Silicon is no longer a premium choice. It's the default choice that happens to also be a long-term cost saver, and the businesses still standardizing on the cheapest available Windows laptop are spending more, not less, over the next three years.