It makes a difference if you’re trying to push it and tax it on purpose. For everyday use it makes no difference since it’s rarely in swap. Almost every test that’s not a synthetic benchmark has shown it performs just as good.Assuming we talk same base model and not equivalently priced m1 with 16gb?
Well, swap with faster SSD does make the difference it seems
M1 is cooler
Obviously cheaper
And I didn't say it's intrinsically better (i may think so but I did not say it lol)
The biggest difference in performance is actually bumping the ram to 16gb, Artisright has a great video series showing the ram upgrade provided much better performance boost than doing the ssd upgrade. The 16gb/256 did better in almost every test compared to the 8/512 model. That helps prove the ssd speed issue isn’t nearly as much of an issue as people make it out to be.
M1 is cooler because the chip is lower wattage and less powerful. Plus It’s thermal limit is also set lower than the m2. The M1 could easily get to 108c under full load if apple allowed it to, but it thermal throttles at 100c instead of 108c. That’s by design by their engineers. Apple gave the M2 more thermal head room to allow it to maintain a higher frequency, even when throttling.
And it should be cheaper, its a 2 year old chipset in a 4 year old design. I find the M1 overpriced in 2022 considering how old the design is now, they came out with a newer model but didn’t lower the price of the M1 at all.
Anyways, that’s my thoughts on it.