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.