Actually, save power efficiency, Apple is still behind the curve and has been for decades. Nvidia has reigned uninterrupted for longer than I can remember and regularly beats Apple in raw performance on available hardware, and AMD has regularly topped benchmarks for years.

In fact, AMD and Nvidia have been the de facto high-performance combination for so long, that I can't remember when it was any different. But prior to that, it was Intel and Nvidia. Apple was never a real high quality hardware competitor. The only thing they ever had to offer were products produced by a production process almost no one replicates.

Razer started used CNC unibodies for their laptops 14 years ago, but they're maybe the only company I can think of that does so other than Apple.

And MSI has shipped high performance laptops for so long that even Apple used their laptops for comparison during the M-series chip releases in the MacBook Pro.