A 16" laptop with no dedicated graphics card is exactly what I would prefer. I would also prefer glossy, tho. But yeah, I don't get why there are no laptops with high power CPUs that don't include a dGPU, for compiling and many other CPU heavy tasks, there's absolutely no need to go over an iGPU, with a Radeon 680m being almost level with an RX 6400.
A lot of people don't need to run the latest AAA blingfest at max settings, run ML workloads on localhost, or drive freaking 8k displays on the go.
And yet, people want quality hardware, good screens, comfortable input devices, and snappy enough hardware to either do work on them or consume online content without going blind.
I'm looking to replace a T490 to improve on the shitty screen that came with it, get a faster CPU with moar cores to compile code faster, and take advantage of the latest iGPU performance jump to drive the 4k display. That's pretty much it.
I bought a high end MBP nearly 10 years ago with discrete GPU, thinking I would use it for numerical physics simulations, graphics development (I used to be a game engine dev), and maybe even games.
Turns out in that nearly 10 years I've hardly used the dGPU at all. The only time I have it enabled is because it's necessary for driving an external display. The things I've run on it in practice just don't use much GPU.
For compute-intensive things I ended up using big, rented servers, which got faster while my laptop aged. For desktop graphics the iGPU has been adequate, and I ended up not really playing games or doing any ML, simulations or video encoding on it. Compiling, editing, filesystem things, code analysis, data storage and indexing, those don't need GPU at all. The browser does but in practice it's so CPU and memory bound, the dGPU vs iGPU difference is not something I've noticed affect browsing.
One game I played for a while, Tux Racer, did work better with dGPU enabled, but that's not enough reason to buy one if it's an optional and expensive feature. However in practice on a MBP you needed the dGPU to get max specs for the other components, which I needed (in fact the RAM was never enough), so it was still a good choice.
