More or less. I’m a programmer, and I want computers to compute things.
If I only wanted them to play youtube, I’d get a tablet instead. If I only wanted a laptop to run a word processor, I would look at these MacBooks or equivalent Windows devices.
> If you have a fixed amount of thermal headroom to play with
In case of ultra-thin laptops like macbooks, the primary reason why it’s fixed to just 10-15W is to look good on marketing materials. Technically, it’s easy and cheap to make it fixed to the value several times higher than that. After all, 10 years ago mainstream laptop CPUs were dissipating 35-45W: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Bridge#Mobile_platform
I'm also a programmer, but don't find performance particularly important once it reaches an acceptable level. I would rather have a thin a light laptop (as would most people, judging by sales).
I should have noted I specialize on desktop and embedded development. I can always find uses of faster CPUs, more cores, and more RAM.
> I would rather have a thin a light laptop
I agree, but to an extent. I don’t have a gamer-targeted laptop because heavy to carry around.
But still, I believe these unupgradable ultra-thin laptops are a bad deal.
They only saving a few millimeters of thickness and ~0.2kg of weight, for a huge performance cost. BTW, I have installed 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD in my reasonably thin (2cm) and reasonably light (1.6kg) 13” laptop.
> as would most people, judging by sales
Judging by sales, most people don’t need a computer at all, they prefer phones and tablets. On the internets, more than half of page views are now from mobile devices.
Can you point to a laptop that's only slightly larger than the M1 Macbook Pro and has much better performance?
Ryzen 7 4800U is very similar to Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U: same core and threads count, same frequency, same 10-25W TDP. The main difference of the new one is Zen 3 microarchitecture instead of Zen 2, and there're quite a few sources comparing Zen 3 to Zen 2.
If you want to be certain, wait for the direct benchmarks.
More broadly, it seems that you prioritize performance over everything else when it comes to laptops. Apple doesn't – especially not in its 13" range. What they are providing is a small form factor with crazy good battery life and performance that's more than good enough for most people.
Thermal throttling is not inherently a bad thing – it's a sign of a balanced design. If you have a fixed amount of thermal headroom to play with, then you want a processor that uses more power at peak loads than you can dissipate (so that you can take full advantage of the cooling off periods provided by non-peak usage).