> I don't think the M1 chip is a great choice for the 16" MacBook Pro. It's designed for lower power devices. It may do well on certain workloads like compilation, but may even regress (in terms of performance, not performance-per-watt) on other workloads.
What workloads do you think won't run better in some manner (faster, lower power consumption, etc.)? It's a general purpose CPU. Apple's own benchmarks talked about a broad range of use cases and the public experience and benchmarks are demonstrating this.
There are obvious performance considerations. With a fan, these M1 CPUs have a higher thermal range and sustained performance. This is the thing that's going to be important in the equivalent of the 16" MacBook Pro. They should have the cooling and battery capacity already in the current form factor. The question is do they have the M1 with many more cores, a new variant of the M1, or do they have some more exotic configuration? Only time will tell.
Corporates buying Macs are going to have to decide if their work can be done on these new models. There is no option but to test it. It'll suit some dev environments, but others (e.g. docker-heavy web shops) will have to stick to Intel for now. There are practicalities like needing to replace broken machines and upgrade from slower 2016/2017 models in many places that means it'd be silly to do a wholesale conversion. iOS and Mac dev shops will have much better flexibility in upgrading, but they are in the minority.
Bigger picture, the new M1 models are great for getting solid machines in the hands of the masses without being revolutionary. Devs can get to work on migrating software without the launch running on like the Mac Pro update did (that was a faux pas from Apple that they seem to have recognized.) It leaves open the possibility that next year we may see a complete form factor update across all laptop lines at Apple. It's to Apple's advantage that they delay that because it's high cost (retooling manufacturing) and high risk (the market doesn't like the product change).
I agree with the bulk of what you're saying -- especially about practical considerations involving the software ecosystem and advantages of moving slowly, but I do believe there are some workloads where I'd prefer a hotter machine with more (and not shared) memory.
I think one of the advantages of M1 is its single-thread access to lots of RAM. That advantage kind of starts to fall off when your workload is heavily multi-threaded, which is often the case for buyers of larger machines with more compute cores.
I also believe that the advantages of low power consumption (or equivalently, thermal efficiency) fall off a little bit when you have a larger thermal envelope, because with a larger device (A) you can fit better cooling, and (B) bursts of compute take a longer time to bring the device to throttle temperatures.
Apple's own benchmarks of the M1 are not compared against the 16" MacBook Pro. They aren't yet offering Apple Silicon on the 16" because it isn't clearly better than the current Intel version, and would have elicited comparisons that aren't as glowing.
I'm thinking specifically games, CAD, and video editing. Even Final Cut Pro workloads (running natively) seem to be faster on a 16" MacBook Pro than on an M1 13" MacBook Pro based on the initial reviews on YouTube today. Sure, an M1 machine could do it consuming less power, but who cares? People buy a 16" because they want speed.
I think they will need redesigned high-performance cores for the 16" and the higher-end 13" [or 14"]. Simply using more of them probably won't cut it.
And MacBooks are not just used in dev environments. They're used in education, finance, media, government, and many other sectors - and some of them do want to be the last to switch. If the performance gains aren't dazzling, they can't be convinced to switch sooner. And if they stay on Intel, they can even be convinced to move back to Windows.
What workloads do you think won't run better in some manner (faster, lower power consumption, etc.)? It's a general purpose CPU. Apple's own benchmarks talked about a broad range of use cases and the public experience and benchmarks are demonstrating this.
There are obvious performance considerations. With a fan, these M1 CPUs have a higher thermal range and sustained performance. This is the thing that's going to be important in the equivalent of the 16" MacBook Pro. They should have the cooling and battery capacity already in the current form factor. The question is do they have the M1 with many more cores, a new variant of the M1, or do they have some more exotic configuration? Only time will tell.
Corporates buying Macs are going to have to decide if their work can be done on these new models. There is no option but to test it. It'll suit some dev environments, but others (e.g. docker-heavy web shops) will have to stick to Intel for now. There are practicalities like needing to replace broken machines and upgrade from slower 2016/2017 models in many places that means it'd be silly to do a wholesale conversion. iOS and Mac dev shops will have much better flexibility in upgrading, but they are in the minority.
Bigger picture, the new M1 models are great for getting solid machines in the hands of the masses without being revolutionary. Devs can get to work on migrating software without the launch running on like the Mac Pro update did (that was a faux pas from Apple that they seem to have recognized.) It leaves open the possibility that next year we may see a complete form factor update across all laptop lines at Apple. It's to Apple's advantage that they delay that because it's high cost (retooling manufacturing) and high risk (the market doesn't like the product change).