Its only disruption if it disrupts. No one cares other than existing Apple users so I guess the only disruption will be the year of really fast and efficient teething issues they will be dealing with.
We have one at work, I'd highly recommend waiting another year before getting one if you want to be productive.
If this was just a new CPU option with a performance boost over Intel (and significantly better thermals) but a compatibility mess - I would agree.
But MBP is 500$ price drop from the Intel variant. At these price points these laptops are a far better value proposition than the competition - Intel thermal performance and power consumption is just terrible, AMD is better but not present in anything premium - in terms of value for money - anyone looking at a premium 13 inch new laptop right now should IMO get one of these devices unless they have a really good reason not to (and admittedly there are plenty of those).
I really hate this situation because Apple is not the company I want to buy hardware from - they really suck on giving options, it's all "Apple know what's best for you" from them and their cult (for example I want a laptop with a touch screen, and ideally a 360 hinge, but there is no touch on MacOS because Apple). I would pay double for X1 Yoga with M1 class CPU. But right now Intel has dragged down the x86 laptop market down for soo long, and is still the only game in town for competition, it's just sad. AMD has good chips but no good devices. Modern ultra portable laptops are throttling, overheating and die instantly or have no work performance - it's just terrible tradeoffs for professionals.
AMD is in Surface laptop 3, and in Thinkpad T14 (supposedly, though the ship times are reputedly several months.) The T14 is premium in a certain class (high value placed on swapping parts.) I suspect there are a few more.
Surface Laptop and T14 are not premium ultraportables, Surface Pro and X1 are - and unfortunately those don't even have AMD CPUs in the upcoming leaks (I would buy one instantly if it came with 5xxx series AMD).
> Anyone in the market for an ultrabook will care.
My current ultrabook is 12 years old and falling apart, but the new Apple designs aren't even in the picture as replacements because they're simply not general-purpose computers. They are appliances.
Yeah but the end user looks at a 60-80C 6-8 hour battery general-purpose computer and a 30-40C 18-20 hour battery appliance and one of them is clearly better for the purpose that they use them for.
We have one at work, I'd highly recommend waiting another year before getting one if you want to be productive.