This idea of “actual professionals” that always comes up in response to apple’s “Pro” moniker amuses me to no end. Everybody throws the term around and no two people have the same definition! What in the world is an actual professional? There are professional journalists that just need a browser and text editor. There are professional programmers working on huge code bases in compiled languages that do need a beefy m…
Of course there are specific niches, but it's pretty easy to answer in general: 'actual professionals' need some combination of two criteria - capacity and reliability/durability/usability. A device which can handle 'large' loads - be it CPU-bound, memory/storage-bound, or even screen size bound, and can be worked hard for 6-8-10-12 hours per day, 5-6-7 days per week without either the machine or the user breaking. T…
It comes from an era when computers were so genuinely slow that doing almost anything - even using page layout like Pagemaker, or setting up just a single track song in a DAW, had tons of render lag. Even spreadsheets would take significant amounts of crunch time to run their calcs, in the very early days. This meant that most work done on computers, with anything larger than a "toy/hello-world" dataset, was going to be painfully slow. That's why they called it "professional" - because you were actually using datasets large enough to burden the beast. Actually balancing a whole company's finances with a spreadsheet, rather than tallying up a little 10-item list.
I want to emphasize that "majoritarian" aspect of it - it wasn't just a few specific kinds, it was a majority of ALL kinds of work.
And that's changed.
We're now at a point where only a tiny minority of tasks done on computers actually have throughput limits based on the computer rather than the operator.