Workstation laptops are expensive. These new Macs are priced quite competitively. E.g. the 14“ with the full M1 Pro is $2.5k and is faster, more portable and has a much better display than a 2.7k Dell Precision 5560…
For me it’s going to be a massive improvement. Already the base M1 builds software faster than my Intel i9… and given that these new chips have 400GB/s bandwidth it will be a ridiculous improvement for my R data analysis code…