> You lose a lot of potential performance that comes with both efficient cooling and maintaining throughput in sustained loads.

So? I can’t carry a full desktop or even Mini ITX build around just in case I need to run a very long sustained load at absolute peak performance.

My 16” MacBook Pro has no problem consuming 80W or more at a time. The fans spin up, but it’s fine. It’s basically near desktop level performance for everything I’m actually doing on the go.

I think people talking about the sacrifices of laptops are either comparing to extreme high end builds or they’re stuck thinking about laptops from 6 years ago.

A 16” MacBook Pro is basically a high end Mac Mini or a base Mac Studio with a battery and screen built in. They only really start to diverge from the bigger machines when you get into the really expensive Mac Studio builds.

> You might hit advertised boost speeds for a little bit, but you can sustain them on properly cooled desktops.

If you’re looking for sustained high performance computing then a laptop is a bad choice, I agree. But what are we even talking about here? Even for compiling large codebases or exporting a YouTube length video project, you don’t need the full thermal solution of a desktop anymore.

Throttling also isn’t a hard stop where the system comes to a halt any more. It just means the system is 60-80% as fast as it could be, which is still very fast. Throttling has become a bogeyman but really, it’s fine. I’ll take the boost for compiling that big project for several minutes. It’s great.

I’m guessing some of these comments are coming from people who haven’t experienced modern MacBook Pro level laptops?