Spurred by M1 Performance, Apple Doubles Shipments of Mac Computers | TechPowerUp The M1 chip is usually found at a perception crossroads: fans of Apple tout its desktop CPU-level performance numbers in some workloads while comparatively sipping power (and even allowing for true fanless designs in the Apple Macbook Air), while non-fans are quick to point out that synthetic benchmarks aren't truly representative of performance. Whatever side of the fence you sit on (even if you straddle it by admitting that the M1 chip can actually outperform much more powerful and core-laden Ryzen CPUs in some specific workloads), the M1 has been a running success for the California-based company. So much so, in fact, that Apple more than doubled its shipments (a 111% increase) in 2021 compared to the previous year. The second manufacturer with the highest shipment growth is Acer, with 73% - and a slightly smaller overall shipment volume.
The success of Apple's M1 only served to increase Apple's confidence in its decision to abandon Intel, and the company is expected to announce the M1's successor sometime this year. Furthermore, a new version of MacOS further increases the divide to Intel-based Macs due to some features only working on their M1 counterparts. When you consider all of that, including the accelerating optimization of many applications for the platform (Capture One, Affinity, and most recently Adobe), the platform maturity that has been achieved in such a short while, and the announcement of even more powerful hardware for content creators, it may be the case that Apple actually keeps up its momentum and presents a rather competitive landscape to the Windows + x86 PC ecosystem (I won't use Wintel because that's, well, inaccurate and unfair to AMD). Apple is surely on the way to carve out more than its current 15,84% market share (which still places it in a second-place in the overall OS market).
Apple's growth in the laptop area as a result of Apple's own CPU development is a tribute to their outstanding work.
