Apple has been vertically integrate for 50 years. Microsoft has been horizontally integrated for 50 years.
That's why Apple is good at making a whole single system that works by itself, and Microsoft is good at making a system that works with almost everything almost everyone has made almost ever.
Microsoft has been vertically integrated for nearly 25 years with the Xbox. I wonder if their internally-siloed nature doesn't allow them to learn from individual teams' success.
The 2019 Macs were vertically integrated and Apple could do NOTHING good with the Intel PowerPig i9 CPUs. My i9 once once ran down from 100% charge to 0% in 90 mins PLUGGED IN ON 95W CHARGER! I was hosting a meeting. The M1-M4 CPUs forsake multithreading and downclock and this is one of the many ways they save power. Video codecs are particularly power efficient on mobile chips!
I used a 2019 MacBook Pro for quite a while, and it was my first (and so far only) dip into Apple-land. While I appreciated the really solid build quality, great screen, etc, the battery life was pretty abysmal. We're talking easily under 2 hours if I had to be in a video call, which basically meant taking a charger to any meeting of decent length.
The 2nd biggest disappointment was when I ran my team's compute-heavy workload locally, expecting blistering performance from the i9, only to find that the CPU got throttled to under 50% (I seem to recall 47%, but my memory is fuzzy), within 6 seconds of starting the workload. And this was essentially a brand new laptop, so it likely wasn't blocked fan intakes. I fail to see the point of putting a CPU in a laptop that your thermal design simply can't handle.
Heh. I had one of those MacBook Pro i9's as a work machine. It was absolutely awful. I remember running an npm / node build and the thing would sound like an airplane was taking off.
That's why Apple is good at making a whole single system that works by itself, and Microsoft is good at making a system that works with almost everything almost everyone has made almost ever.