did it really?
I feel like they are largely similar in performance and performance per watt as the competition on the same processor node
Apple usually is the first to pay for the next node shrink, which just gives them the performance benefit of one generation…
for example, Apple M1 GPU vs Steam Deck GPU, Apple has a ~60% lead, but they are TSMC N5, whereas the Steam Deck GPU is built on the N7 node, (and there was the N6 node in between those two!)
The A12 is Apples N7 SoC, and draws up to ~6W, and the GPU has roughly 1/3rd of AMD Steam Deck compute, pretty in line with power draw.
Watt for Watt, Node for Node pure performance seems just good to me, not really surpassing anything else by a lot.

/e: btw, I don’t want to be knocking Apples achievement here!
M1 is really impressive, they matched established manufacturers on the first try (see Intel for what happens when you don’t), and managed to bake some translation to x86 into their ARM hardware as far as I understand. That’s really cool.
It’s just that I’ve been told to death how insanely much more power-efficient than x86 their architecture is, and I haven’t really found the data to support it. When X86 is used efficiently (i.e. not in Desktop parts, where power consumption “doesn’t matter”) and on the same node, performance per watt is usually similar. That seems true for the