Honestly a lot of the differences are business decisions. There is a balance between price, raw performance and power efficiency. Apple tend to focus exclusively on the latter two at the expense of price, while Intel (and AMD) have a bad habit of chasing cheap raw performance.
They use a huge physical area of silicon for their high performance chips. The “Pro” line of M chips have a die size of around 280 square mm, the “Max” line is about 500 square mm, and the “Ultra” line is possibly more than 1000 square mm. This is incredibly expensive to manufacture and package.
They pay top dollar to get the exclusive rights to TSMC’s new nodes. They lock up the first year or so of TSMC’s manufacturing capacity at any given node, at which point there is enough capacity to accommodate other designs from other TSMC clients (AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, etc.). That means you can just go out and buy an Apple device made from TSMC’s latest node before AMD or Qualcomm have even announced the lines that will be using those nodes.
Those are business decisions that others simply can’t afford to follow.
People overblow the importance of ISA.
Honestly a lot of the differences are business decisions. There is a balance between price, raw performance and power efficiency. Apple tend to focus exclusively on the latter two at the expense of price, while Intel (and AMD) have a bad habit of chasing cheap raw performance.
Apple does two things that are very expensive:
Those are business decisions that others simply can’t afford to follow.