1. People whose needs are satisfied by almost any laptop with an SSD and semi-recent CPU/GPU.
2. People who need the absolute top-end system but can fit their work on a single machine (e.g. if you had a model which uses 20GB of RAM, a 16GB machine is unsuitable but a 32GB machine is fine).
3. People who have so much data / computation that no normal computer can handle it.
My gut feeling is that #1 covers most of the market and the question is really how many people fall into group #2 but not group #3, especially in the context of laptops where the ceilings are smaller on both the Mac and PC side. I would further expect that a fair number of the people in the second group are not running those workloads 24x7 and thus have a practical, often cheaper, option of renting an hour of time on AWS/Google/Azure/etc. when they need to do something and get the results faster rather than leaving their laptop running for a day or two — even the best laptop GPUs are smaller capacity than what you can rent on a server.
1. People whose needs are satisfied by almost any laptop with an SSD and semi-recent CPU/GPU.
2. People who need the absolute top-end system but can fit their work on a single machine (e.g. if you had a model which uses 20GB of RAM, a 16GB machine is unsuitable but a 32GB machine is fine).
3. People who have so much data / computation that no normal computer can handle it.
My gut feeling is that #1 covers most of the market and the question is really how many people fall into group #2 but not group #3, especially in the context of laptops where the ceilings are smaller on both the Mac and PC side. I would further expect that a fair number of the people in the second group are not running those workloads 24x7 and thus have a practical, often cheaper, option of renting an hour of time on AWS/Google/Azure/etc. when they need to do something and get the results faster rather than leaving their laptop running for a day or two — even the best laptop GPUs are smaller capacity than what you can rent on a server.