I used a 2019 MacBook Pro for quite a while, and it was my first (and so far only) dip into Apple-land. While I appreciated the really solid build quality, great screen, etc, the battery life was pretty abysmal. We're talking easily under 2 hours if I had to be in a video call, which basically meant taking a charger to any meeting of decent length.

The 2nd biggest disappointment was when I ran my team's compute-heavy workload locally, expecting blistering performance from the i9, only to find that the CPU got throttled to under 50% (I seem to recall 47%, but my memory is fuzzy), within 6 seconds of starting the workload. And this was essentially a brand new laptop, so it likely wasn't blocked fan intakes. I fail to see the point of putting a CPU in a laptop that your thermal design simply can't handle.

Yeah I had that same i9 16 inch from 2019. Easily the worst Mac I‘ve ever owned (in 20 years!). Now I‘m on an M2 16 inch an it is night and day.