Item — HN Reader

You are absolutely right, most home users don't care about power consumption when it comes to desktop computers.

All this negative shilling about power consumption of Intel and AMD desktop CPUs started after Apple ARM processors appeared on the desktop. Apple sells soldered SSD and CPUs with un-upgradeable RAM, and the proprietary SoC is no longer a true general purpose CPU as only macOS can run properly on it. Performance wise also they don't truly beat AMD (and in some cases Intel) processors. This is a huge negative factor for Apple Silicon based hardwares. Thus, the only negative marketing they can do about Intel and AMD processors is based on its higher power consumption.

That said, Intel and AMD will (and do seem) to care about power consumption for their laptop and server segments.

Apple’s chips are well regarded simply because they’re laptop chips - which they excel at because that’s where power consumption matters.

You can run Linux and openbsd on Apple M series chips, what do you mean only macOS?

Linux and *bsd run crippled on M series chips as Apple doesn't provide the hardware specifications or device APIs for system programmers for utilising the GPU etc on its SoC. Linux developers are forced to reverse engineer everything for the Apple Silicon because Apple is hostile to system developers. This in in sharp contrast to Intel or AMD processors where these OSes can fully utilise the chip hardware to deliver maximal performance, because Intel and AMD are more open with their hardware literature.