If they're not generating power on site & creating noise/consuming local natural gas resources, they're guzzling grid power and almost certainly contributing to electrical rate increases that affect residential customers disproportionately.

Fewer people cared, sure.. but it's because until recently they weren't eclipsing power consumption of extremely energy-heavy industries, noticeably driving local residential energy prices up.

They also weren't so heavily noise polluting nor were they typically built in places where their noise pollution affected so many people.

'Dense' models of yesteryear (e.g. llama:70b, gemma2/3:27b) tend to be significantly slower by comparison, therefore, your hardware spends a lot more time 'maxed out' for a given prompt.

Manufacturers ditching Apple Carplay/Android Auto support will, if not immediately, inevitably pursue rent-seeking behavior in the form of paid subscriptions for services people could otherwise just have for free (and likely better) via phone.

The Pro/Max rollout tends to lag behind by about 6 months.

It used to be a little less 'weird' when the base M-chips were only available in the Air and 13" MBP.

Still no M4 Ultra Studio available.

I suspect the M5 Pro/Max chipped MBPs will bring some of these improvements you're looking for.

'Real-world idle' efficiency on the newer chips is the main reason I've got the (slight) itch to upgrade, but 64GB+ MBPs certainly don't come cheap.