There was a segment on Linus's wan show on the weekend that mentioned that perhaps Apple were hamstringing thermal solutions on the Intel chips to allow their ARM based chips to seem more performance by running cooler.
This was amusing, in a follow up video, they removed the heat sink from a modern apple laptop, which wasn't making correct, or proper contact with the chip die - leading to incredibly poor thermal performance.
I watched the video. Of course, Linus was joking, they are still competing in the market today. Another conspiracy theory was that these laptops were designed for Arm, but they couldn't get their silicon ready in time, so had to shoehorn in higher power Intel processors. This one doesn't make much sense either, as there's cTDP down options on Intel.
Apple have had some abysmal thermal solutions over the years. Some of the engineering decisions made by their hardware division for Macs have been really baffling - if it was any other company, they would probably have gone out of business. Fortunately, it looks like the latest MacBook Pro 16 seems to have finally fixed their long time glaring flaws - chiefly the unreliable keyboard and the inadequate thermal solution. It's still not up to par with their competitors, but at least now it's not throttling hard.
It's entertaining :)
Will be very interesting to see where they end up. Especially with AMD's new mobile chips being very tasty for productivity.