Apple

You can’t even install windows natively on an M series processor mac, so the performance is impossible to measure.

You cant have Windows as the primary OS on an M1. Only virtualized. Which runs smoothly for the times when you need it to run an app or a game. To use it as your do-it-all OS seems a bit counterproductive when you have MacOS already.

Can you explain, in a reasonable amount of detail, why you feel Apple hardware and Windows make for a good combination?

You can only run the arm windows version via virtual machines. The problem is that one, windows on arm is not very well optimized yet in general and two, most windows applications are not made natively for arm. Hence, microsoft built a translation layer similar to Apple’s rosetta. However, that costs even more performance because the OS is virtualized already. Nevertheless, it runs surprisingly well on Parallels, even with a few games. VMware fusion is free for personal use but not quite as performant as parallels. All in all I don’t recommend using Windows on Apple silicon hardware right now if you can avoid it. It’s not the best experience.

Shit. You cant do bootcamp anymore since its Arm so you need parallels (power limited) or a local VM (those just dont run well honestly) and then you are dealing with translation layers. If you need windows, get a Dell XPS. Its as good as they get on windows. If you dont, feel free to buy an M1.

M1 air is trash and it cant run windows nativly, virtuilizing arm windows is super slow and there are very few apps that work while emulating x64 windows is unusable