Was never really into Apple hardware (mainly the price), however I recently got an M1 Mac Mini and an iPhone for app development, and the inference speed for as you say, a 5 year old chip is actually crazy.

If they made the M series fully open for Linux (I know Asahi is working away) I probably would never buy another non-M series processor again.

I got an M1 Mac Mini somewhat recently as well, to replace my ~2012 Mac Mini that I use as a media center PC. And frankly, it's overkill. Used ones can be had for $200-$300 USD, lower side with cosmetic damage. An absolute steal, IMO.

Work gave me an m1 pro with 32gb on it. A year ago I put together one of those minisforum board+laptop apu with 64gb ram and 2tb nvme for not much money at the time, likely 500usd. For the performance sensitive software I was working on the 7935hs ran with about 50x more throughout using compilers with llvm backend.

You can still get an M1 Macbook Air at retail for $599 ($300 for refurbs), which is a Chromebook price for a laptop that is better in pretty much every respect than any Chromebook.

If you're going for refurbs, you can get a device with an AMD 7000/8000/9000 APU, at the same or lower price point, and the iGPU itself will perform better than an M1 for prompt processing and generation, even with SODIMM memory.