I was surprised at the price point as well
Possibly this is reflected in my general consumer use case, but all of my high computation oriented use cases are offloaded to a desktop.
Where are you deriving the majority of the value for this offering?
If I were to write tests, that is.
But at least now I know :D
That's very unusual. If you want a laptop for the easy stuff you're usually looking at a MacBook Air or iPad in the Apple ecosystem. These laptops are focused on people who want to be able to do "everything" on a portable computer.
At some point when you are "doing everything" you start to be tied to a physical location anyway. Multiple screens, hook ups to external equipment. So it just doesn't make much sense to me to actually need to do everything in a portable manner.
Edit: Apologies, I didn't address the part about the Mac OS ecosystem.
If you never require portability then a desktop is sufficient.
If you frequently require portability then it's worth getting an air and building your workflow (if possible) around offloading heavy computation to the network, e.g. heavy use of build servers, SSH, syncing.
But many people spend most of their time at a desk, but sometimes require portability. For example in a meeting, visiting a client, working from home occasionally, etc. For these people a heavy duty laptop is the best solution.
Like 3D rendering? Or deep learning training?
More broadly, that's why I put 'everything' in quotes. There will always be cutting edge workflows that require the power and cooling you can only get on a desktop or server, but that's a minority of a minority.
There are plenty of people who want to run multiple VMs, edit/render 4k+ videos, edit large audio projects, do semi-complex data analysis, or any of 100 other tasks without needing to choose power vs portability, or manage multiple devices.
Or even if you are working on model that is on the server you still need to have good specs in order work with it.
Employers for their employees?
1) Giving a bit less than half of it to the government and getting nothing, or 2) Giving all of it to Apple and getting a MacBook.
Works out to an effective 35+% discount on every business expense.
That used to be pretty common. But I'll almost certainly use one of these to replace ~2015 vintage iMac and MacBook Pro. Unless you want to keep the contents on a laptop and a desktop separate or have very high-end multimedia workload requirements, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to pay for and manage two separate devices at this point.
I think a lot of pros these days don't.