In my case, I have come back from an Macbook Pro 16" M1 to an Intel I9 16" 2019. I need to boot natively from windows sometines, and virtualize some OS, like Solaris. That is imposible with an Apple Silicon.Apple computers are and always will remain a perfect blend of hardware and software. Despite the many criticisms that many of us rightly direct at Apple for bugs and inaccuracies of various kinds.
So, Intel T2 or no T2, welcome a new maOS 15 that, from my point of view, might even permanently exclude all Intel Macs. I also sincerely hope so because my 27" late 2013 iMac, after 13 years (2013-2026), would finally come to an end and I would no longer have to worry about keeping it alive by revitalizing it and continuously updating it with OCLP, that still makes it ultra perfect for my uses. In addition, my Intel 27" i7 late 2013 iMac, with macOS 14.5 Sonoma, allows me to perfectly use Parallels Desktop 19 with Windows 11 Pro at ultra-high performance and macOS High Sierra with old video capture software essential for my work. After all, it would not be bad for us to be able to continue working with Sonoma for another two years and wait, in the meantime, for the new operating systems and CPUs to integrate better (or perfectly) with AI-based technology.
That said, as soon as macOS 15 is released in September or October, I will also purchase my first Silicon Mac.
So, the great Howard Oakley thinks that "...a lot of users with relatively recent T2 Macs would be gutted that they could never run a version of macOS more recent than Sonoma, and that in two years time, Apple would be dropping all security support for that last version to run on Intel." And Howard is a bright and good person and a great expert on the structure of macOS.
And geekbench is the same.