> In my experience, one of the the problems is that Macs are hilariously underpowered for many modern dev and analytics use cases.

This is what I do and works perfectly. My dev machines are 82 cores xeon platinums with Terabytes of RAM or nodes with 8 V100 GPUs attached, etc.

I don't know of any workstation, much less laptop, that could be a replacement for any of that.

For the stuff I do on the laptop itself (Word/Powerpoint/Outlook, web browsing, using an editor to edit files remotely, etc.), more power wouldn't hurt, but my macbook is a macbook air 2013... so I can't imagine that a 2020 macbook would be underpowered.