Ok, I believe you're being sarcastic, because this little paragraph is ridiculous, so I'll address it as if you are - because then you have a very good point.
This is Apple's Pro line. There is no more performant laptop that they make. It's a portable workstation - a home tower that you can take with you. If people want battery life of 10+ hours or a light weight, they get the model optimized for that. Apple seems to not offer a real pro laptop (portable workstation) - period. People who use these pro laptops are either compiling code or doing heavy graphics.
Work gives us Dell Precision laptops with 9 hours battery life during casual use, a pretty dang powerful discreet GPU, and oh - Xeon CPUs. No offense apple, but this "pro" laptop is a toy in comparison.
So I don't get it - apple's plan. I couldn't seriously use their products for work unless I want to lose productivity. Why don't they make something that's actually "pro" instead of calling what everyone else calls mid-tier a "pro" and then completely excluding the actual pro target market all together. Do they just not want more money?
As a developer, waiting less time for your device to finish an operation, while sitting there reading HN, makes you not need as much battery life. And the Dell seems designed for a full workday plus an hour. Now, I'm not a dev - did that for a year of my 20+ year career, too much sitting looking at code. I do however script a lot - with gigs of text output from data collection of logs and performance data, usually doing basic calculations or transformations. I look a lot at large datasets and graph them. I need a big GPU, I need fast CPUs. I mount up a 20G RAM drive because the disk is too slow.
Now yeah - when compared to another Apple laptop w/ a Xeon, the M1 is faster for single threaded specialized workloads. Because Apple uses CPUs a generation behind everyone else, has worse cooling, and still loses on multicore. In real life, when I run a shell script on my laptop, and a coworker runs it on the same dataset on an M1, his is an all day run - he does it overnight. I do it over a long lunch - it's not even a real comparison.
Now yes - My laptop gets hot, fans are blasting, and if my charge is at 80%, it literally won't charge while the script is running. But... that's what I want from a "pro." Now, his isn't a pro, and it stays barely warm. But we're talking the difference between 7 hours and 2 hours here. I don't think the "pro" is going to be all that much better.
So I get the apples to old apples comparison. However apples to flagships from others - I highly doubt apple a serious contender for the portable workstation. Which is what "pro" should be.
Let's wait for some benchmarks, I see no reason not to have an open mind here. They seem to have taken a very serious shot at this, and even on paper, having up to 64GB of VRAM available opens up a lot of opportunities.
The RTX 3090 - literally the top performing card available, that doubles as a space heater has 24GB of VRAM. Either you're wrong, or Apple built a Civic with a huge exhaust. Which will sound like a vacuum cleaner...
Here are the top Dell specs to compare.
128GB ECC RAM. 6 core Xeon. NVIDIA RTX a5k. Huge exhaust panel on the back (keep the CPU clocked high longterm instead of for burst). 120Hz 4k display (the 4k they've had for many years now). 14TB storage.
And you know what? It's pretty thin. And very sturdy.
Now, I'm not crapping on Apple's new laptop. I'm sure it's awesome, and can compete very well with the mid tier laptops from other vendors, at twice the price and half the durability. And it's always been that way. From keyboards that break from typing, to keyboards leaving key imprints on the screen. Can't expect much from a looks-first company that can't get a keyboard right, and builds their phones out of slippery fragile glass.
My issue is with their constant misleading meaningless marketing garbage. They are the orange clown of computers. If they made an umbrella, they'd build it out of laser-drilled ice, in the shape of a beautiful swan, and melting would be the built-in cleaning feature.
This is Apple's Pro line. There is no more performant laptop that they make. It's a portable workstation - a home tower that you can take with you. If people want battery life of 10+ hours or a light weight, they get the model optimized for that. Apple seems to not offer a real pro laptop (portable workstation) - period. People who use these pro laptops are either compiling code or doing heavy graphics.
Work gives us Dell Precision laptops with 9 hours battery life during casual use, a pretty dang powerful discreet GPU, and oh - Xeon CPUs. No offense apple, but this "pro" laptop is a toy in comparison.
So I don't get it - apple's plan. I couldn't seriously use their products for work unless I want to lose productivity. Why don't they make something that's actually "pro" instead of calling what everyone else calls mid-tier a "pro" and then completely excluding the actual pro target market all together. Do they just not want more money?
As a developer, waiting less time for your device to finish an operation, while sitting there reading HN, makes you not need as much battery life. And the Dell seems designed for a full workday plus an hour. Now, I'm not a dev - did that for a year of my 20+ year career, too much sitting looking at code. I do however script a lot - with gigs of text output from data collection of logs and performance data, usually doing basic calculations or transformations. I look a lot at large datasets and graph them. I need a big GPU, I need fast CPUs. I mount up a 20G RAM drive because the disk is too slow.
Now yeah - when compared to another Apple laptop w/ a Xeon, the M1 is faster for single threaded specialized workloads. Because Apple uses CPUs a generation behind everyone else, has worse cooling, and still loses on multicore. In real life, when I run a shell script on my laptop, and a coworker runs it on the same dataset on an M1, his is an all day run - he does it overnight. I do it over a long lunch - it's not even a real comparison.
Now yes - My laptop gets hot, fans are blasting, and if my charge is at 80%, it literally won't charge while the script is running. But... that's what I want from a "pro." Now, his isn't a pro, and it stays barely warm. But we're talking the difference between 7 hours and 2 hours here. I don't think the "pro" is going to be all that much better.
So I get the apples to old apples comparison. However apples to flagships from others - I highly doubt apple a serious contender for the portable workstation. Which is what "pro" should be.