It's a lovely machine and I am sure it's worth the money to many people. But I am seeing an increasing trend of creative people moving away from macbooks and now possibly the mac pro in favour of cheaper options such as Windows based machines (imac and mini still seem good value?). If Apple aren't careful then they will lose a lot of their core consumers. Once a critical mass is achieved then they will no longer seem the go-to brand for creative people and will lose the 'cool' image with them.
I'd love another Macbook or another of their range but I just can't justify it
Same here - I would love a new MBP (mine is early 2011). However I can't justify the cost of a new 2019 MBP with the serious issues - my previous one died with a nVidia 6800 and this one's logic board has been replaced already due to GPU failure and one of the RAM slots has died so I have 8GB and single channel bandwidth into a i7. I don't game now.. and the GPUs have all died due to hard core Compute based experimentation for astrophotography image processing. The current design just can't handle it.
Given that I want a GPU with 8-16GB of GPU specific ram (ie discrete) that requires a shadow of 8-16GB of system memory.. it means a system memory of 16-32GB would be required.
Once the data is loaded in the the GPU, along with the kernels (GPU programs), then all the CPU needs todo is coordinate the GPU program calls and sync the rendered output to a window.
The problem with lesser mac laptops is that the memory size isn't there for an eGPU with decent memory.
Options I have looked at are 32GB mac mini with eGPU but I like the form factor. An alternative is Linux but I find the experience of development too focused on solving the Linux dependencies rather than solving the the problem, that focus is what MacOS and Xcode gives me.. although their dropping OpenCL/GL is annoying because Metal is not portable.
Alternative is go buy myself a shotgun instead with the money.. would last longer and is just as expensive (accumulated cost over 10+ years).