Yeah this is key. In a laptop that’s meant to be used as a laptop, designing for maximum power at all costs isn’t the winning move. M1 was nice in that it’s plenty powerful while also not making the laptop’s fans scream and being able to survive away from an outlet for several hours despite doing “real work”.
In short, balance, which is still surprisingly hard to come by in x86 laptops. If you want a 10lb monster desktop replacement, gaming laptop that does the 2016 Apple thing and crams too many watts into too thin of a chassis, or a really weak ultraportable with mediocre battery life you’ve got plenty of options. If you want reasonable performance with great battery life and silence however you’re restricted to a tiny handful of options.
It would be interesting if Apple took a crack at an M-series HEDT variant that’s allowed to chug electricity freely though, even if that’d be extremely niche.
What I am doing is comparing top of the line from Apple, to top of the line period. And consistently, Apple is always behind on workhorses, to get work done. They are better in your "light quiet slightly longer battery" category. At 50% more cost. The free laptop from work - I want the most powerful portable thing available. For personal life, now way I'm paying the Apple tax. So - no use case in my life. I do always get my wife iphones and macbooks though. She teaches languages to little kids and I don't want to spend my time helping her with tech stuff, so the Apple tax is worth it. But never for the hardware - just for the walled garden and fisher-price UI for kids.
The Precision is not light, but that's because it's thick metal that you can run over with a car, and extremely durable. No one complained about a thinkpad being built sturdy. For the use case you describe, an XPS with an I7 at the time was super light, got about over 10 hours of battery life if you just did regular office work (no compiling or large data processing), and has similar specs. I used to take that with when I'd go internationally. It absolutely did not get hot - the key was to turn off turbo boost if on battery by setting max CPU at 99%.
The thing is, if we compare pricepoints, you could have a Precision for the cost of an M1, and now you have desktop power on the go. It's not super-light, but it's still light and thin enough to put in a shoulder bag and not get neck pain.
Just like no one complained about the clunky Nomad before the iPod was introduced. Then only CmdrTaco complained (deep cut. It’s a 20+ year old reference)
The cost is/was comparable to higher end XPS and Thinkpads.
> you could have a Precision for the cost of an M1,
It's a perfectly valid choice, that doesn't mean other people can't/don't have different preferences which are just as as yours valid.
Apple didn’t come out with high end ARM Mac laptops until later. Yes from a laptop - a portable computer - I loved being able to plug it in overnight and to use it all day at a customer’s site without worrying about battery life.