Maybe, I am missing something but the price seems high.

Possibly this is reflected in my general consumer use case, but all of my high computation oriented use cases are offloaded to a desktop.

Where are you deriving the majority of the value for this offering?

In general, the people here will use the perf to run webpack faster.

webpack is usually fast enough, jest is where I need CPU & RAM.

If I were to write tests, that is.

Pro tip: if you can switch some tests from using JSDOM to Node as the test environment they will run significantly faster.

Ah, thanks for the tip. It will probably not change much for the project I currently work on, with tests using react-testing-library, so JSDOM is required in nearly all test files.

But at least now I know :D

>all of my high computation oriented use cases are offloaded to a desktop.

That's very unusual. If you want a laptop for the easy stuff you're usually looking at a MacBook Air or iPad in the Apple ecosystem. These laptops are focused on people who want to be able to do "everything" on a portable computer.

>These laptops are focused on people who want to be able to do "everything" on a portable computer.

At some point when you are "doing everything" you start to be tied to a physical location anyway. Multiple screens, hook ups to external equipment. So it just doesn't make much sense to me to actually need to do everything in a portable manner.

Edit: Apologies, I didn't address the part about the Mac OS ecosystem.

This is for people who require portability epsilon percent of the time.

If you never require portability then a desktop is sufficient.

If you frequently require portability then it's worth getting an air and building your workflow (if possible) around offloading heavy computation to the network, e.g. heavy use of build servers, SSH, syncing.

But many people spend most of their time at a desk, but sometimes require portability. For example in a meeting, visiting a client, working from home occasionally, etc. For these people a heavy duty laptop is the best solution.

> These laptops are focused on people who want to be able to do "everything" on a portable computer

Like 3D rendering? Or deep learning training?

I suspect there are people who want to do 3D rendering on a laptop, and these devices are probably a good option for them.

More broadly, that's why I put 'everything' in quotes. There will always be cutting edge workflows that require the power and cooling you can only get on a desktop or server, but that's a minority of a minority.

There are plenty of people who want to run multiple VMs, edit/render 4k+ videos, edit large audio projects, do semi-complex data analysis, or any of 100 other tasks without needing to choose power vs portability, or manage multiple devices.

I've always wondered who is buying these super fast apple laptops? Freelancers with that much cash to throw around on a laptop, who wouldn't be buying an imac or mac pro instead for nearly as much? If you are doing this sort of stuff for work, you probably already have a server you connect to or at least a beefy workstation under your desk you are using for the heavy lifting. A lot of people in this space just use an i7 dell workstation from their employer that's probably cheap and thats that. Especially in the age of aws there is no reason anymore to run a lot of data analysis stuff locally anymore when you can get compute power for seconds at a time. I feel like they must sell so few of the top spec macbooks.

Remember, stuff is “cheaper” for freelancers / businesses than consumers. For me, on $2k in self employment income, I have the option of either:

1) Giving a bit less than half of it to the government and getting nothing, or 2) Giving all of it to Apple and getting a MacBook.

Works out to an effective 35+% discount on every business expense.

I have always used MBP for rendering. Usually not for final renders. I'm not always connected to high-speed internet so it is handy for work-in progress renders especially if you are not in the office.

Or even if you are working on model that is on the server you still need to have good specs in order work with it.

You can remote into the server and use that horsepower from anywhere, no?

Freelancers who work from home and an office or on the road. I edit photos and video and haven't had a desktop machine for almost 20 years.

I'm sure a few people are doing this but it seems like such a teensy market compared to freelancers who generally work in one place in front of a massive imac screen.

Why do you think that freelancers “generally work in front of a massive iMac screen?” That’s anecdotally very wrong, especially depending on what type of freelancer you’re talking about (the term alone is too broad to be useful).

> I've always wondered who is buying these super fast apple laptops?

Employers for their employees?

Usually they do a bulk order of the base model.

The previous "high end" 13" Macbook Pro started at $1800 so this is a $200 increase for larger higher resolution 120Hz screen, much faster performance, and all the ports they took out years ago.

>my high computation oriented use cases are offloaded to a desktop

That used to be pretty common. But I'll almost certainly use one of these to replace ~2015 vintage iMac and MacBook Pro. Unless you want to keep the contents on a laptop and a desktop separate or have very high-end multimedia workload requirements, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to pay for and manage two separate devices at this point.

I don't have a desktop.

I think a lot of pros these days don't.