The difference in noise pollution comes from power density & power generation, if they're doing so on site. The power demand (and resulting waste heat) absolutely eclipses that of data centers of olde.
If they're not generating power on site & creating noise/consuming local natural gas resources, they're guzzling grid power and almost certainly contributing to electrical rate increases that affect residential customers disproportionately.
Fewer people cared, sure.. but it's because until recently they weren't eclipsing power consumption of extremely energy-heavy industries, noticeably driving local residential energy prices up.
They also weren't so heavily noise polluting nor were they typically built in places where their noise pollution affected so many people.
It's gotten significantly better with the advent of local/offline MoE models (e.g. qwen3.5:35b-a3b, qwen3:30b-a3b, gpt-oss:20b-3.6b), which offer a good balance of prompt response speed and output quality.
'Dense' models of yesteryear (e.g. llama:70b, gemma2/3:27b) tend to be significantly slower by comparison, therefore, your hardware spends a lot more time 'maxed out' for a given prompt.
Manufacturers ditching Apple Carplay/Android Auto support will, if not immediately, inevitably pursue rent-seeking behavior in the form of paid subscriptions for services people could otherwise just have for free (and likely better) via phone.
The non-pro/max chipped MBPs have always been a little 'lower spec' in several regards. There used to be a little more separation though, with the non-pro chips available only in the Air & 13" MBP, but back then people complained about Apple having 'too many models'...
I suspect the M5 Pro/Max chipped MBPs will bring some of these improvements you're looking for.
Part of me misses my OG base 14" M4 Pro. The battery on that thing was absolutely phenomenal - literal 12-14+ hours of real-world use. Not so much on the 14" M1 Max (64GB) that I upgraded to after about 2 yrs.
'Real-world idle' efficiency on the newer chips is the main reason I've got the (slight) itch to upgrade, but 64GB+ MBPs certainly don't come cheap.