Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

> What in the world is an actual professional?

I would say that generally, a "professional" user of pretty much any tool, is someone for whom the tool's quality is a constraint on their professional productivity.

A professional paint user is an artist. A professional telescope user is an astronomer—or a sniper. A professional typewriter user is a stenographer. A professional shoe user is an athlete.

In all these cases, it's the quality and innovation in the tool, that's holding these professionals back from being even better at their job than they already are.

Also, take special note of the case of the stenographer: professionals often require special professional variants of their tools, which trade off a longer learning curve for a higher productivity ceiling once learned. A stenographic keyboard takes years to learn, but all non-stenographic keyboards cap out at 150WPM, while stenographic keyboards allow those trained in their use to achieve 300+WPM.

And to make one more point: a professional car driver isn't a race-car driver. A professional car driver is a chauffeur. Rolls-Royce's cars aren't famous for how luxurious they are to drive; they're famous for having all the amenities needed by professional drivers — chauffeurs — to allow them to efficiently cater to their clients' needs. Limousines are the same kind of "professional tools" that stenographic keyboards are: they increase chauffeuring productivity.

> How did [video editing] become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers?

Because all tech vloggers and most tech pundits — the people who review tech — edit videos as part of their jobs, of course ;)

I'm a professional programmer... hardware constraints aren't exactly the limiting factor when i use vim all day.

You don't compile your code?

Obviously it depends greatly on what kind of software you are writing, but at all my dev jobs, I eventually end up waiting for some amount of time while the CPU heats the room up.

Notably, VIM is inevitably more gentle on my CPU than VSCode and similar.

What are those Rolls Royce features needed by chauffeurs?

It depends on the project. E.g. if you ever have to compile the linux kernel, or firefox you'll be wishing for a beefy cpu.

You could comfortable develop say a large e-commerce site on a 7 year old Macbook Pro, so I’d assume an M1 based Air would be equally fine.

Rolls Royce isn't a tool for the chauffeur, but it's a tool for the passenger. It's a tool for distributing the information that the passenger is wealthy enough to own it, and it enables more conversation options with certain NPCs ;p

I've been around software development for over 20 years.

Never met a single engineer who didn't want faster build/test cycles.

I envy writers in a sense. Their job doesn't require fast hardware so the computer is always waiting for them.

Programmers have to deal with compilation wait times, lack of RAM slowing down workflows, network latency, etc. We have to wait for the computer to do their job.

I await the day that I won't have to deal with this and computers would be as fast as our train of thought(human input latency nonwithstanding). But I won't hold my breath.

Except a lot of people work on remote servers. My work MBP is nice, but really it’s just a terminal to an 80vcpu server.

You just came here to say you use VIM.

What if you wanted to drive a few more monitors for logging, monitoring and docs or have a local k3s cluster running for development or run some exploratory scripts on large data sets or build a large project from source? Professional programming is a vast and varied field.

You missed their point slightly. You wouldn’t be one of the users that is limited by the constraints of that tool.

If I’m a professional driver, but my passenger likes being discreet for example, then maybe I drive a Camry instead of a Rolls Royce. In your case, you probably don’t need a professional-grade laptop.

Me however, also a professional programmer, I run about 10 docker containers, a big ide, and lots of other hungry programs. I definitely am less limited when my computer is faster.

Esc key vs touch bar does not influence how you can use vim?

Absolutely incorrect. Watch e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBIkJSpqcFs

Rolls-Royce’s cars are designed for use as service cars, in corporate/government motor-pools. They’re essentially the ultimate Uber car. Rich individuals are actively discouraged[1] from buying them to drive themselves. (They’re actually kind of crap for driving yourself in!)

If a rich individual owns an RR model, it’s always because 1. they have retained the services of a professional chauffeur, and 2. the chauffeur has requisitioned one, to use to serve their client’s needs better.

Ask any ridesharing-service driver who worries about customer-experience — the ones that deck out the back with TVs and the like — what they wish they were driving.

A few example features these cars have:

• a silent and smooth ride allowing for meetings or teleconferences to occur in the back seat (this “feature” is actually achieved through many different implementation-level features; it’s not just the suspension. For example, they overbuy on engines — or rather, overbuild[2] — and then RPM-limit them, so that the engine never redlines, so that it’ll never make noise. They make the car heavy on purpose, so that the client won’t even feel speedbumps. Etc.)

• A set of automated rear seat controls... in the front. You know who’s coming, you set the car up the way they’re expecting, quickly and efficiently. This includes separate light and temperature “zones”, in case you have a pair of clients with mutually-exclusive needs. Yes, you can deploy a rear side window-shade from the driver’s seat (presumably in response to your client saying they have a migraine or a hangover.)

• An umbrella that deploys from the driver’s door. This is there for the chauffeur, so they can get out first, have an umbrella snap into their hand, and then use it to shield their client from the rain as they open the client’s door.

• A sliding+tinting sound-isolation window between the front and back, controlled by the client in the back; but then an intercom which the front can use to communicate to the back despite the isolation window — but only one-way (i.e. the front cannot hear the back through the intercom.) Clients can thus trust that their chauffeur is unable to listen into their private conversations if they have the isolation window up.

• A lot of field repair equipment in the boot. These cars even have a specific (pre-populated!) slot for spare sparkplugs; plus a full set of hand-tools required to get at the consumables under the hood. The chauffeur or their maintenance person is supposed to populate this stuff when it’s been used; such that the driver is never caught without this stuff in the field; such that—at least for most problems the car might encounter—the car will never be stalled on the side of the road for more than a few minutes.

Etc etc. These cars (from which most “limousines” are cargo-cutting the look, without copying the features) are built from the ground up to offer features for chauffeurs to use to serve client needs; rather than to offer features clients use to serve their own needs.

Which is why these cars are expensive. They’re really not luxury items (as can be seen by the fact that they retain most of their value in the secondary market), but rather:

1. it’s just expensive to build a car this way, because these use-cases, and the parts they require, are somewhat unique;

2. the people who buy these cars — who are by-and-large not individuals, but rather are businesses/governments with a motorpool component — are willing to pay more to get something that can be used at sustained load for decades with low downtime and high maintainability; to serve many different clients with varying needs, changing configuration quickly and efficiently; and to offer a smooth and reliable set of amenities to said clients. In other words, motorpools buy these Rolls-Royce limos instead of forcing regular sedans into that role, for the same reason IT departments buy servers instead of forcing regular PCs into that role.

—————

[1] RR did build their Wraith model so they could actually have something to offer these people who wanted a Rolls-Royce car to drive themselves. But it’s really kind of a silly “collector’s model” — most people in the market for a luxury coupe wouldn’t bother with it. It’s just a halo product for gearhead collectors with RR brand loyalty.

[2] Rolls-Royce Motors, the car maker, is actually owned by their engine manufacturer, Rolls-Royce plc. RR plc exists to engineer and build engines and turbines for these sort of server-like high-reliability low-downtime SLAed use-cases, as in planes, rockets, power plants, etc. RR plc went into the car business for the same reason Tesla did: as a testbed and funding source for their powertrain technologies.

That's fair. I think a lot depends on your stack and the specific project. Right now I spend a good chunk of time waiting for builds (usually 10-20 seconds) and my previous job was worse. Prior to that, not so much.

A professional user of a given tool. It's a qualified phrase.

You can be a professional, without being a professional user of all your tools. In fact, for any such tool, there's probably only one or two professions that are professional users of that tool specifically (i.e. where that is the tool that constrains their productivity.)

Many professions aren't constrained by any tools, but rather are constrained by human thinking speed, or human mental capacity for conceptual complexity. These people aren't "professional users" of any tools. They're just regular users of those tools.

So, to sum up — when a tool is described as being "for professionals", what that means is that the tool serves the needs of people who are members of a profession whose productivity is constrained by the quality of that tool. It doesn't mean that it's for anyone who has a profession. Just people who have those professions. They know who they are. They're the people who were frustrated by the tool they have now, and for whom seeing the new tool elicits a joy of the release of that frustration. An "ah, finally, I can get on with my work without [tool] getting in my way so much."

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Programming is a profession that is most of the time constrained by thinking speed. (Although, some of the time, we're constrained by grokking speed, which is affected by the quality of the tools known as programming languages, and sometimes the tools known as IDE code-navigation.)

Very little time in a programmer's life is spent waiting for a build to happen, with literally no other productive tasks that they could be doing while they wait.

(Someone whose role comes down solely to QA testing, on the other hand, tends to be a professional user of CI build servers. Faster CI server? More productive QA.)

I admit that my experience with RR is the same as experience with deep space exploration (equals zero), so your comment was a quite entertaining read. Thanks ;)