Both Intel and now Qualcomm seem bitter and snarky that customers are trying their own thing.
(In Qualcomm's case, perhaps Google with their upcoming Tensor chip, perhaps Apple, perhaps both.)
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While Intel's marketing department is doing ads that I'm not sure accomplish much of anything other than make Intel look petty, at least their CEO seems to have a more sober take.
He's fighting to make a better product. Good.
That said, they'll have an uphill battle to fight. Intel claims a roughly 20% IPC improvement for Alder Lake. If we take the Apple M1, and Intel's Tiger Lake UP3 (roughly similar thermal levels), a 20% boost puts them at 1694 points on Geekbench 5, which would be within 1% of 2020's M1, scoring at 1712.
But Alder Lake seems to accomplish this in part by again raising the actual wattage. That's not a great sign.
It's good that Alder Lake adds heterogenous cores, and it sounds like Windows 11 will do a good job spreading workloads between those. But it remains to be seen whether, in real life, using an Alder Lake machine will be as nice as an M1.
And even in that unlikely event, Apple's M2 will likely be almost ready by the time Alder Lake ships in volume.
Competition is good, though.
No word yet on whether today's M1 Pro and M1 Max support eGPUs. Probably not. The M1 does not, but it's unclear to me if this is a hardware limitation, something Apple can add later on in software (missing drivers?), or even something third parties could choose to implement.
I thought the intro was a bit much, but what a tone shift from "the Mac should no longer have any boot chime at all" to "not only should it have one; we're gonna use it to open our presentation!".
That event was full of nods towards "this is not the Apple of 2016".
Unfortunately, the high nit numbers announced for the new MacBook Pros don't seem to apply for regular use; that's still (apparently) 500 nits. But briefly, just briefly, you might be able to use those in the forest.