As someone who was very excited about ARM several years ago and still is using ARM for half of my homelab equipment, it's unfortunately rapidly become irrelevant. x86 CPUs can now run as efficiently at the same TDP while still beating it in performance with all the benefits of x86. Unless something unforeseen changes, I probably won't be buying any more ARM machines for homelab/server use. Still using what I already own, of course.

RISC-V seems cool though, but not sure that it will be more attractive than x86.

This seems nonsensical to me. It's physically impossible for ARM competitors to match the performance of Apple ARM?

Not to mention that we're talking about their lowest-specced CPU here and there are far more powerful ones.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+A18+Pro+%28MacBook+Neo%29&id=7232

EDIT: downvoters in denial. They get better synthetic Geekbench numbers compared to some of the latest desktop x86 processors ("beats" 7950X and "meets" 9950X), but get absolutely smoked by those same processors in real use. Maybe your only use of a computer is running Geekbench idk.

Where the heck are you getting these results from because there's absolutely no way these results are real. The M5 Max doesn't even get anywhere near the 9950X much less the A18 Pro.