If you believe that, then you've either been accidentally ignoring Apple's chip R&D over the past three years, or intentionally spinning it against them out of some more general dislike of the company.
The most powerful Macbook Pro, with a Core i9-9980HK, posts a Geekbench 5 of 1096/6869. The A12z in the iPad Pro posts a 1120/4648. This is a relatively fair comparison because both of these chips were released in ~2018-2019; Apple was winning in single-core performance at least a year ago, at a lower TDP, with no fan.
The A14, released this year, posts a 1584/4181 @ 6 watts. This is, frankly, incomprehensible. The most powerful single core mark ever submitted to Geekbench is the brand-spanking-new Ryzen 9 5950X; a 1627/15427 @ 105 watts & $800. Apple is close to matching the best AMD has, on a DESKTOP, at 5% the power draw, and with passive cooling.
We need to wait for M1 benchmarks, but this is an architecture that the PC market needs to be scared of. There is no evidence that they aren't capable of scaling multicore performance when provided a higher power envelope, especially given how freakin low the A14's TDP is already. What of the power envelope of the 16" Macbook Pro? If they can put 8 cores in the MBA, will they do 16 in the MBP16? God forbid, 24? Zen 3 is the only other architecture that approaches A14 performance, and it demands 10x the power to do it.
The most powerful Macbook Pro, with a Core i9-9980HK, posts a Geekbench 5 of 1096/6869. The A12z in the iPad Pro posts a 1120/4648. This is a relatively fair comparison because both of these chips were released in ~2018-2019; Apple was winning in single-core performance at least a year ago, at a lower TDP, with no fan.
The A14, released this year, posts a 1584/4181 @ 6 watts. This is, frankly, incomprehensible. The most powerful single core mark ever submitted to Geekbench is the brand-spanking-new Ryzen 9 5950X; a 1627/15427 @ 105 watts & $800. Apple is close to matching the best AMD has, on a DESKTOP, at 5% the power draw, and with passive cooling.
We need to wait for M1 benchmarks, but this is an architecture that the PC market needs to be scared of. There is no evidence that they aren't capable of scaling multicore performance when provided a higher power envelope, especially given how freakin low the A14's TDP is already. What of the power envelope of the 16" Macbook Pro? If they can put 8 cores in the MBA, will they do 16 in the MBP16? God forbid, 24? Zen 3 is the only other architecture that approaches A14 performance, and it demands 10x the power to do it.