Of course, the last four years have had much less focus on core performance, or even on putting more cores into pro-sumer machines. Apple in particular is all about thinness, battery life, and passive cooling.
That's not a complaint. For most people, including me, those are good trade-offs.
Hm... Not sure I agree. I have a 2015 MBP and I was blown away by nearly 2x difference vs a comparable desktop with identical amount of RAM and CPU cores. My workload is compiling Golang code. The desktop is twice as fast and without the heat + fan noise drama.
The laptops, or at least the MBP, seem to be built to mostly run on idle IMO.
I use Chrome, JetBrains IDEs and emacs all day and recently made the switch to a beefy Linux desktop after 13 years of Apple laptops and I'm blown away by how much faster everything is. I guess I was living in denial about the performance differences.
>The laptops, or at least the MBP, seem to be built to mostly run on idle IMO.
This is very much my experience when switching from my previous MBP Retina to my power workhorse desktop. Even my newer XPS 15 is mostly optimized around idle I'm pretty sure.
Of course, the last four years have had much less focus on core performance, or even on putting more cores into pro-sumer machines. Apple in particular is all about thinness, battery life, and passive cooling.
That's not a complaint. For most people, including me, those are good trade-offs.