I have both a Latitude 7370 for personal use and a Precision 3520 for work. Lugging that Precision around is a pain in the butt. It is big and bulky, noisy and hot. That said, as my eyes continue to age, the 13” screen of my Latitude does seem smaller than it once was, though the crispness of the 3200x1800 is much better than the grainy 1080p in the Precision. And I do miss the number pad sometimes. My perfect form factor these days would probably be a 14-15” in a similar profile as my Latitude (it is essentially a poor man’s XPS 13).
IMO for many people a laptop means highly portable, wire free 'desktop' computing experience that you can't get on a tablet. Therefore the comparison for mobility is with a tablet and not a powerful Windows laptop.
Plus many people working in tech have specific systems for specific tasks; I use a spec'ed up Windows laptop for heavy lifting and games, and an M1 Air as my main computer.
But at the same time, many people also asks for performance improvements, and sometimes extra few USB A ports too. Plenty people makes hyperbolic claims such as which Apple Mx CPUs has x times more computation than which NVIDIA GPUs, superficially focusing on raw CPU performances.
I know deep down that thinnest laptops with brightest displays sells the most in reality, marketing wise, but it just sounds a bit hypocritical to me.
For ultraportables I think people just want performance to be “good enough” while also not getting hot or spinning up a fan. The M1 Air struck this balance very well – it was no speed demon but wasn’t pokey either, and battery life didn’t suffer for it.
This was in stark contrast to contemporaries where any semblance of decent battery life required low power mode, which made them dog slow. Even today this is something that x86 laptops with current chips struggle with… there are a handful of x86 ultraportables that can get M1 MBA like battery life, but they have larger batteries than the MBA had and still need low power mode to pull it off reliably.
That’s where a lot of the hype around “M-series SoC is capable of X performance” is rooted. It’s not the performance in and of itself, but the perf per watt, which allows that performance without also turning the laptop into a furnace/jet or destroying battery life.
Because the point of a laptop is to be portable? And a large chunk of that is being small and light? I could haul my full desktop and monitors around with me, but it's not worth the tradeoff. If I can get a computer that does 70% of what my desktop can do at a tenth of the weight and size, that's worth the money.
Super critical for those that travel a lot, whether for work or personal needs. I've lugged some boat anchors around; having extra space for the necessities, or just being able to work in economy class on a long flight, are premiums I'm willing to pay for.
