> so where are the competing ARM laptops that are anywhere close to the power of Apple's version of ARM?
Better question: where are the incentives for them to make it? Apple is pretty much the only company with an outstanding architectural license to design ARM cores, and the best off-the-shelf ARM core designs don't even compete with 5-year-old x86 ones. If you're a company that has Apple-level capital and Apple-tier core design chops, you might as well embrace RISC-V and save yourself the ARM licensing fee. That's what Nvidia does for many of their GPU SOCs.
If SoftBank offered ARM licenses under more attractive terms, there would be genuine competition for good ARM CPUs. Given that Apple has a controlling stake in SoftBank, I wouldn't hold out faith.
> Apple is pretty much the only company with an outstanding architectural license to design ARM cores
Many other companies have done this to great effect in the past, but in recent years it has become more common to just license one of ARM's own stock cores, instead of designing your own from scratch.
This follows a period where companies like Qualcomm and Samsung were still trying to roll their own core designs from scratch, but ending up with designs that were slower and less power efficient than the cheaper stock cores you could license from ARM.
Better question: where are the incentives for them to make it? Apple is pretty much the only company with an outstanding architectural license to design ARM cores, and the best off-the-shelf ARM core designs don't even compete with 5-year-old x86 ones. If you're a company that has Apple-level capital and Apple-tier core design chops, you might as well embrace RISC-V and save yourself the ARM licensing fee. That's what Nvidia does for many of their GPU SOCs.
If SoftBank offered ARM licenses under more attractive terms, there would be genuine competition for good ARM CPUs. Given that Apple has a controlling stake in SoftBank, I wouldn't hold out faith.