But at what thermal, power and monetary price? Edit: @deepnotderp[1] found the power adjusted basis: https://mobile.twitter.com/witeken/status/147844103741682893... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29802359#29803502
Depending on the workload: does it need to? Most people I've seen use laptops near chargers, or at least within 2 hours of the nearest charging opportunity. Sometimes people travel and need more, but I don't think it's that common to need eight hours of charge at maximum performance. Don't get me wrong, the M1 is an engineering marvel and as Apple's competitors move to a similar node size I hope they too will get the…
I wouldn't necessarily bet on that. RRP for the chip they're talking about is $635; it's the top end. M1 Pro machines (the Max is a red herring; the cheaper Pros have the same CPU performance) start at $2k. Generally, laptops containing Intel's most expensive mobile chips cost more than that.
Like, it's probably in principle possible to produce a laptop containing the offending chip for $1320, but I doubt you'll see many of them.
Power use also has implications for the thermal envelope. Most laptops using Intel's current top-end chips can't sustain the top-end performance for long at all; they need to throttle to avoid melting.