Since i came from a monster of a laptop in 2020 - i could share my thoughts.
Previously in Dec 2020 i have owned Lenovo legion 5 17" 10750h/1660ti/16gb RAM. I will compare it to base 512gb M1 Air.
1) Speed. Across the OS UI and opening the programs: well that is surprising, less hardware capable M1 Air opens in the same time all of my programs like Lightroom(even Rosetta), DaVinci, R, Python. That is a huge plus for Air m1 from me.
2) Battery. On M1 i get 15 hrs, while with lenovo that was barely 6-8 hours on very low brightness and dGPU off manually, which needed the system reboot.
3) Gaming. Yeah gaming is better on Windows monster, but that was also more expensive machine. So for the difference in price i could afford xbox ses and close the gaming topic for myself here.
4) Noise. Well as i said the speed is on par between both, but Air is silent and cold and portable. Lenovo was also silent, but i could hear fans sometime and it run warm all the time.
5) Lags. On M1 Air i was happy at first, but once i installed manually IOS apps, it became luggy. So far i have seen reboot reports(blue screen on Win) far more than on Win laptop. I am sure that clean install of Mac without ios apps will help the problem, but that is annoying and considered to be a first mover bug for me. I hope they will fix it in the future models. So far this is my only biggest concern.
6) Speakers. Sound is so better on Air, while lenovo freaked me out by offering to pay additional money for some sort of Dolby to get better sound. I mean really? I paid more than grand and now i have to pay another 60 bucks to make my speakers/headphones sound not crappy?
7) Camera and mic. Hands down camera and sound are better on Win laptop. It also had a cover to close the webcam and the image quality far better.
8) OS. Well some things better here and some there. Up to preferences. Personally i do like the screenshot, screen recording features of Mac OS and multiple desktop feature. So Mac is good to have many things open side by side, while Win felt better at organizing my stuff and dragging windows, icons and folders.
9) Screen. Screen was better in Win laptop in terms of ergonomics, but Air has more pixels and retina does the job. However i prefer Win on this case for ergonomics.
10) External display support. That is a well know problem, so to get 1080P UI you need either 1080P or 4K display on Mac. I have 2k display and the fonts are super small, if i make it 1080P then the screen is blurry. If i mirror my mac to external in 1080P, then the image is big and crystal clear but i have big/wide black frames on the left and right of 2k monitor. So Win laptops do better with external.
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As a conclusion, you need very powerful Win laptop to be on par with M1 Macs.