The M1 is truly a performance marvel compared to Intel: Today power/ thermal envelope is what counts. M1 stuns Intel by offering better peak performance and a hugely better power balance.
As to optimization: In any architecture, the compiler is naturally a key technology for obtaining best performance, and anyone who thinks this is just shenanigans is an imbecile.
Vertical integration always offers design advantages for optimization. This is why rich owners of stuff always want to be even richer owners of even more stuff. Derp, derp.
Apple with M1 has raised the bar beyond Intel's capacity to adapt at every level of commodities PC design.
(AMD isn't even mentionable on this topic; the reason that company exists is to shield Intel from antitrust)
PC design, according to Apple, is an evolution of an entire system to a use case.
According to Microsoft, all they can innovate is the Start Menu, because it's their only selling point. Every other usability aspect is copied from Apple. There's nothing extraordinary about Apple's template, they just do the unusual, for computer nerds, which is to study the basic reason of the system and organize the GUI accordingly — they just apply and stick with a basic usability logic. It's not that amazing an ethos, but they try. Although lately it's becoming stupid as Apple continues to refine things that don't need attention past the point of usability.
Linux just copies Windows, and not even diligently. Linux is far and away the most tedious design space of the three. A perverse paradox appears with Linux wherein all that freedom somehow conspires to never, ever produce even one design innovation. With Linux, everyone is thrilled by the assembly the coolest looking AMC Pacer made of discarded and broken supermarket shopping carts. The core technology, metallurgy, bearings, etc are there, as is the concept of a graspable handle for steering wheel, baskets welded together with a couch tossed in for coach, and casters all around for ultimate degrees of turning freedom. But I defy anyone to present even a single marvel of usability that arose in that ecosystem? Show just one standard-setting usability innovation. Everything that makes a linux great was inherited from Kernigan+Richie and the Phone Company.
As to the Framework laptop, it looks like an iFixit meme searching for an audience.
Who cares about modular upgrades when generational advances eclipse the refinements? If the Framework was introduced 5 years ago, you would be stuck with a SATA drive: the PC industry wasn't pushing NVMe products, yet drive IO is one of the most important areas of recent system PC performance gain.
Apple designs typically show the industry how to apply PC technology. It was Apple that forged ahead on adoption of NVMe. 20 years ago it was Apple pulling USB adoption. And ARM is another case in point: Apple is leading Intel by the nose to what's important in Intel's own architectures. This isn't debunkable, or even debatable, it's just the course of history.
Re Framework: Its upgradability is trapped within the chipset generation in which its offered. It comes down to a specific idea of what "upgradability" means. If you want to argue for systems SW designs that stay rigidly within a HW budget, then we have to throw out the entire industry, as it would've never occurred. If you want to argue for modularity within a generation, why do you think the industry (Apple) doesn't already know the right cut on this?
The Framework argues that generationally, wherever you are at is enough, and for making cheap choices to under-provision your system based on not knowing your own usage style, because presumably you don't even know why you have a refrigerator (according to a leading Framework reviewer) much less a laptop. Such shortcomings you will make up for later by throwing more money at the problem. And plugging your refrigerator back in.
At Apple, when you under-provision because you have no idea why you're buying this thing, and have to throw more money at the problem later once you have learned, at least you will reap a generational advance for the additional cost.
As to parsing out the infinite details of exactly how many permutations and degrees of freedom of the arrangement of modules, such approach wildly underestimates how tightly bound system software advances are to architecture generations. There is enormous misunderstanding about how and why Apple operates its schedule for retiring products. It's less malevolent than you fear, and much more about rational structural imperatives in an insanely complex industry.
If Framework's pitch is that we've moved beyond generational advance to fully modular designs...? Well Apple is currently proving such a claim is completely unfounded, as Apple just got done completely resetting the bar on power vs performance.
We could go on like this all day.
The Framework makes me like the bad parts of Apple more, because it shows there is a core logic to Apple's products, not the least of which is about making products that are typically very good, that making their shareholders fantastically rich, and all the while meaningfully advancing personal computing — Not withstanding the parasitical aspects of rapacious capitalism and it's dread incursions on human rights. But 'C'est la vie', cheese-eating surrender monkeys!