First, the specs on the Intel MBP weren't even top of the line. You could get laptops with slighyl higher spec CPUs, and much better discrete graphics like the 2080 that blew the AMD graphics in MBPs out of the water.
Secondly, and most importantly, having a powerful chip, in a small chassis without adequate cooling = hard thermal throttling.
The M1 chips are an upgrade on top of this with much less power draw for same performance, however both M1 Air and Pro still throttle, and M2 will throttle most likely more.
If you want top of the line performance in a laptop, you have to buy one of those bulky ones with very loud fans, and expect that running at full performance on battery will drain the battery quickly There is no way around this. And to call those machines "laptops" is really a misnomer even, considering that its almost painful having them on your lap due to the heat.
Not every single word has to be read 100% literally every time you read it. It is a very powerful laptop. In the top .5% of laptops purchased in the year it was purchased, most likely. It does not have to literally be the most powerful laptop a person can buy. I think everyone reading that sentence understood that but you.
Do you understand what thermal throttling means? It means your powerful-on-paper computer becomes just as powerful as a much lower priced computer.
And that is also assuming that the rest of the computer is good. Lets not forget the horrendous touchbar, the multitude of bugs in the OS, the lack of ports and hubs that have issues and in some cases end up frying the smc, shoddy external monitor compatibility and so on.
Issues that my much cheaper laptop that is running linux does not have.
> Do you understand what thermal throttling means?
Yes. Don't patronize me.
You're, presumably intentionally, missing the point of what I and everyone who has responded to you is saying.
I am going to exit the conversation because it is clear that you're not interested in actually understanding what anyone is trying to explain to you about how people typically communicate with one another.
I'd like to remind you that this conversation was not about how "powerful" a given laptop is, but rather about how people talk about things in relation to one another and how people tend to speak to one another colloquially.
