> I'm also a programmer

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.

>They only saving a few millimeters of thickness and ~0.2kg of weight, for a huge performance cost.

Can you point to a laptop that's only slightly larger than the M1 Macbook Pro and has much better performance?

If I wanted a new one, I'd look for something like HP ProBook 635 Aero G8 with AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U CPU.

But there’s no indication from benchmarks that it would have much better performance then the MacBook Pro. Indeed, it would be expected to perform less well on some common tasks - and it has half the battery life. I can’t even find a benchmark comparing that particular laptop to a MacBook Pro. Did you find one somewhere?

There're benchmarks comparing M1 with Zen 2 mobile CPUs such as Ryzen 7 4800U. Based on the results I saw, on average, AMD delivers similar single-threaded performance, and way better multithreaded 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.