You're comparing against the ultra. I'm using (and talking) about the base model Max, which is $1999 all in. (The Ultra is 20 core, btw. It's essentially two Maxes fused together.)
I will agree that the Ultra ($3999) is probably not a great value for most people, since outside of synthetic benchmarks, it's usually more like 10-20% faster, not 100%, as outside of editing 8k video or AI, there really isn't much that scales well to that many threads.
Another thing I'll mention, and that I think really is a big part of the special sauce, is the insane memory bandwidth.
A 7950x has a maximum memory bandwidth of 83.7GB/sec. An M1 Max has 409GB/sec.
It's really hard to outrun RAM that's essentially soldered directly to the CPU.
I’m generally a pretty big fan of self-built systems in general and Intel in particular (what can I say, every couple years they pulled a rabbit out of their hat during my childhood, it was really magical).
But that memory bandwidth is some envy inducing stuff.
I will agree that the Ultra ($3999) is probably not a great value for most people, since outside of synthetic benchmarks, it's usually more like 10-20% faster, not 100%, as outside of editing 8k video or AI, there really isn't much that scales well to that many threads.
Another thing I'll mention, and that I think really is a big part of the special sauce, is the insane memory bandwidth.
A 7950x has a maximum memory bandwidth of 83.7GB/sec. An M1 Max has 409GB/sec.
It's really hard to outrun RAM that's essentially soldered directly to the CPU.