I think they are quite competitively priced within their respective market segment. And regarding „lack of upgrades“… M2 to M1 is better progress than Intel had from 2017 to 2021.
One of the reason why it seems like Apple performance improvements are slowing down is because they are still using pretty much the microarchitecture of A14, while x86 just moved to a new generation of cores. Apple doesn’t operate like other chip makers in the CPU space. They release small incremental updates every years, with bigger redesigns every few years instead. So far the pattern has been a new cache subsystem this year, redesigned backend that year etc. It might seem like Apple doesn’t make any gains in the CPU performance department but A15 for example made the E-cores much more powerful. Not as flashy and won’t reflect much in the benchmarks, but nevertheless very important.
The bottoming is that we‘ll see the next performance leap from Apple once they release their new P-core designs. But all the talk about „ARM running out of steam“ is very much premature. There is always the option of vertically scaling performance by increasing per-core power consumption.
