The 2018 MBP seems to have gone a long way towards the head of the mobile workstation pack with the elimination of the silly RAM limit (and the new 6-core chips, but everybody either has those or soon will).
It has the fastest mobile chips available, which now (with the throttle fix) perform exactly as expected (yes, they can perform slightly faster - everything I've seen is less than 10% - in a machine twice the weight). I can't even find some 12 pound Clevo with a desktop i9 - it seems like the 6-core mobile CPUs are good enough performers that the incentive to build 300 watt "laptops" that use desktop CPUs has mostly gone away.
The RAM complaint was real, but eliminated with this generation (unless you're in a real corner case where you need 64 GB, in which case Lenovo and HP, and maybe others have much larger laptop workstations).
The SSDs are the fastest available, and the capacity now goes up to a huge 4 TB. There is one real issue, which is that there is no option for mixed internal fast and slow storage to save money.Dell, HP and Lenovo have heavier systems which will let you use a 512 GB PCIe SSD, then have a couple of terabytes of hard drive or even SATA SSD to increase capacity at a more reasonable cost.
That leaves the controversial keyboard, the ports, which are looking better and better with time as USB-C peripherals and cables become more common, and the GPU.
If only machines with the best keyboard are professional, then only ThinkPads are professional. I'd rather have the Apple butterfly (in its more recent incarnations) than the majority of Dell and HP keyboards, not to mention generic gaming laptops - as long as it's covered by AppleCare. We'll see if the 2018 version becomes really reliable.
The GPU is always what's left... Yes, the Radeons Apple chooses are a power-optimized, rather than a performance-optimized choice. Every other mobile workstation under 6 lbs does essentially the same thing. The Quadro P1000s and P2000s HP, Lenovo and Dell use in the vast majority of their mobile workstations are no more powerful than Apple's Radeons. Dell will let you have a Quadro P3200 (as a $1000 upgrade) in a thick, heavy 15" workstation, not the popular thinner one, and a Quadro P3200 is essentially a GeForce 1060. All the 17" workstations have very powerful GPU options at huge cost.
That leaves (in addition to 17" workstations at 8-9 lbs and well over $5000 if you take the GPU upgrade), a bunch of gaming laptops. The Razer Blade 15" is a good example of a well-designed gaming laptop that does get a GeForce 1070 into a reasonable chassis. The reviews I found say that it gets almost unbearably hot, and that it really only runs on battery for any length of time on tasks that don't use the GPU (it has half the MBP's battery life writing or browsing the web, and that goes down to an unspecified but short amount if the GPU kicks in). In a similar configuration, the Razer Blade is about $500 more than the MBP (although it has a 4K screen instead of 3K).
The alternative option for big-GPU gaming laptops is real lunkers - at least double the weight of the MBP. Some of them are actually heavier (and draw more power) than some iMacs. Even these don't have reasonable battery life (FAA regulations wouldn't let them on planes if they had a battery that would actually power them).
Apple has made one particular set of GPU choices - primarily for battery life, but partially because Final Cut really wants an AMD GPU (they may also be sticking a finger in Adobe's eye). There is no mobile Vega just yet, so they're stuck with these last-generation parts. Even when a mobile Vega comes out, the MBP will get a fairly small one to preserve the battery. They don't have the AMD chip to build a "Razer Blade" style laptop right now, but they almost certainly won't when the chip exists, either - not their market.
They see the MBP's competitors as the thin-and-light workstations from Dell, Lenovo and HP, and it is highly competitive with all of them. They are also blade SSD only(replaceable, but no 4 TB), feature full-power CPUs (some of the more innovative HP designs don't, and are thermally stuck with quad-cores) with low-power GPUs and 32 GB of RAM.
Add a couple pounds to get to a full size 15" workstation, and you see more storage options, sometimes 64 GB as an expensive RAM option, and maybe a modestly faster GPU as an expensive option.
A 17" workstation from HP, Lenovo or Dell buys you hugely more storage options, a 64 GB RAM option for sure, and the option to add a very expensive GPU with a lot more power.
A reasonably sized gaming laptop adds GPU, but at huge compromises in battery life and non-gaming usability (heat, for one thing).
A "lunker" gaming laptop adds a lot of GPU power, but Apple says they effectively make one (they didn't bother with a 30 minute battery) - they call it an iMac, and it's about as portable as some of these monsters.
It has the fastest mobile chips available, which now (with the throttle fix) perform exactly as expected (yes, they can perform slightly faster - everything I've seen is less than 10% - in a machine twice the weight). I can't even find some 12 pound Clevo with a desktop i9 - it seems like the 6-core mobile CPUs are good enough performers that the incentive to build 300 watt "laptops" that use desktop CPUs has mostly gone away.
The RAM complaint was real, but eliminated with this generation (unless you're in a real corner case where you need 64 GB, in which case Lenovo and HP, and maybe others have much larger laptop workstations).
The SSDs are the fastest available, and the capacity now goes up to a huge 4 TB. There is one real issue, which is that there is no option for mixed internal fast and slow storage to save money.Dell, HP and Lenovo have heavier systems which will let you use a 512 GB PCIe SSD, then have a couple of terabytes of hard drive or even SATA SSD to increase capacity at a more reasonable cost.
That leaves the controversial keyboard, the ports, which are looking better and better with time as USB-C peripherals and cables become more common, and the GPU.
If only machines with the best keyboard are professional, then only ThinkPads are professional. I'd rather have the Apple butterfly (in its more recent incarnations) than the majority of Dell and HP keyboards, not to mention generic gaming laptops - as long as it's covered by AppleCare. We'll see if the 2018 version becomes really reliable.
The GPU is always what's left... Yes, the Radeons Apple chooses are a power-optimized, rather than a performance-optimized choice. Every other mobile workstation under 6 lbs does essentially the same thing. The Quadro P1000s and P2000s HP, Lenovo and Dell use in the vast majority of their mobile workstations are no more powerful than Apple's Radeons. Dell will let you have a Quadro P3200 (as a $1000 upgrade) in a thick, heavy 15" workstation, not the popular thinner one, and a Quadro P3200 is essentially a GeForce 1060. All the 17" workstations have very powerful GPU options at huge cost.
That leaves (in addition to 17" workstations at 8-9 lbs and well over $5000 if you take the GPU upgrade), a bunch of gaming laptops. The Razer Blade 15" is a good example of a well-designed gaming laptop that does get a GeForce 1070 into a reasonable chassis. The reviews I found say that it gets almost unbearably hot, and that it really only runs on battery for any length of time on tasks that don't use the GPU (it has half the MBP's battery life writing or browsing the web, and that goes down to an unspecified but short amount if the GPU kicks in). In a similar configuration, the Razer Blade is about $500 more than the MBP (although it has a 4K screen instead of 3K).
The alternative option for big-GPU gaming laptops is real lunkers - at least double the weight of the MBP. Some of them are actually heavier (and draw more power) than some iMacs. Even these don't have reasonable battery life (FAA regulations wouldn't let them on planes if they had a battery that would actually power them).
Apple has made one particular set of GPU choices - primarily for battery life, but partially because Final Cut really wants an AMD GPU (they may also be sticking a finger in Adobe's eye). There is no mobile Vega just yet, so they're stuck with these last-generation parts. Even when a mobile Vega comes out, the MBP will get a fairly small one to preserve the battery. They don't have the AMD chip to build a "Razer Blade" style laptop right now, but they almost certainly won't when the chip exists, either - not their market.
They see the MBP's competitors as the thin-and-light workstations from Dell, Lenovo and HP, and it is highly competitive with all of them. They are also blade SSD only(replaceable, but no 4 TB), feature full-power CPUs (some of the more innovative HP designs don't, and are thermally stuck with quad-cores) with low-power GPUs and 32 GB of RAM.
Add a couple pounds to get to a full size 15" workstation, and you see more storage options, sometimes 64 GB as an expensive RAM option, and maybe a modestly faster GPU as an expensive option.
A 17" workstation from HP, Lenovo or Dell buys you hugely more storage options, a 64 GB RAM option for sure, and the option to add a very expensive GPU with a lot more power.
A reasonably sized gaming laptop adds GPU, but at huge compromises in battery life and non-gaming usability (heat, for one thing).
A "lunker" gaming laptop adds a lot of GPU power, but Apple says they effectively make one (they didn't bother with a 30 minute battery) - they call it an iMac, and it's about as portable as some of these monsters.