Hardware

as good as apples M chips are, they arent as good as the media hypes them up to be,

They really are. You've clearly never used them. I f*cking hate Apple under Tim Cook - penny pinching, nickel-and-dime dicks with a hugely customer-hostile approach to hardware maintenance and insane prices on upgrades, especially in the current generation. Their once-great software has just been crumbling into a dreadful jankfest in the last few years, so macOS now is mostly just a PITA trial of micro-aggressions and really just no longer fun to use. It's basically just become Windows.

But the hardware; repairable or not, oh my, that hardware. Best performing, coolest running, longest battery life laptop I've ever used by a huge margin - and that's M1 Max, so arguably the worst of the M1-M3 lineup for battery life and now only comparatively average performance (M3 Max will get another 50-100% on it depending on workload). No performance drop, flat out all CPU and GPU cores, on battery.

It's absolute night and day compared to Intel. It's not even close. It's laughable. Intel mobile chipsets are awful.