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

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 machine, and there are professional programmers that just need a dumb terminal to ssh into a dev machine in the cloud.

And then of course what the largest subset of people seem to mean is professional video editors or content creators. What percent of the working population are video editors? Some tiny fraction, how did that become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers?

And then a lot of things that people also complain about like how replacing the wider variety of ports with usb c or thunderbolt is contradictory on a “professional” machine also don’t really make sense. Professionals can use dongles like anyone else. In fact many professionals will have more specific needs that require a single a way, for instance having a builtin sd card reader doesn’t help a professional photographer using cfexpress cards.

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.

The point is not a professional using a computer, it's a professional computer user - someone who doesn't just use a computer to do their work, but someone for whom the limits of the computer are the limits of the work they can do.