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I could get away with using my old 2013 Macbook Pro for 90% of my computing needs. I could run the rest in the cloud. Sure I have the latest AMD and I know the headline numbers but I wouldn’t be able to tell you that consumer chips improved all that much in the past few years purely from a practical pov.

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Same here, but that last 10% of computing needs can complicate things.

Try running two 4k external monitors on a Haswell MBP.

They look about the same, but a Haswell MBP13 (Late 2013) is very much less capable than an Ice Lake MBP13 (2020). Not all of that difference is attributable to the CPU I suppose, but the graphics and thermal throttling under load certainly are.

Even 2019 i9 MBP can't do that without extreme overheating and throttling, measured with pmset -g thermlog.

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