You will if you use macos and want to stay supported. On the other hand, being an M1 puts you squarely in Asahi supported territory.

won't be an M6 pro, they are saving the ram and other components for the M7 series

Fun fact: the laptop in this size/performance class with the best battery life is a Windows Intel Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, not a MacBook Pro!

So Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago rather than what Intel is delivering now.

There's no happy medium here that would satisfy everybody: when they make marketing claims about improvements relative to products from several years ago, they get criticized for not focusing on the improvements relative to last gen (even if those comparisons are also somewhere in the announcement). When they focus on the most recent generations, people complain that it doesn't make sense to upgrade every year.

Just accept that even if you aren't still using an Intel MacBook Pro, the comparison is still relevant to some part of their target market.

They only just dropped support for Intel Macs from this fall's operating system release (but are still doing security patches for the releases that Intel Macs can run). A year from now, it actually will be fairly reasonable to expect them to give up marketing to the holdouts.

I would guess there's still quite a lot of people on Intel Macs out there (they were sold 5 years ago), so it is still very much worth it for Apple to market to them.

More people than you think (outside tech) are using Intel Macs at the moment (family computers etc).

I think it makes sense. Do you think most potential buyers are coming from last year's model, or from laptops that are more like 3-5 years old?

As long as they're clear about the comparisons they're making ("X% more battery life than Y" as opposed to simply ("X% more battery life") I'm good with it.

Why? Apple devices have the best battery life in the market right now to my knowledge. It's an important part of the evaluation for a laptop which is the opposite of cringe.

They want those users to upgrade, I don’t see the problem.

I've always done the opposite; getting the base model (maybe bump 1 spec), but then just stay current.

In your shoes, I'd just get whatever Pro processor is available at that time. (Knowing that new processors were coming, I happily bought an M5 Pro machine last month)

This M6 is the base Pro model. You probably want the M5 pro/max for your LLMs.

Not really - it seems that M7 will come out in Q1 27 and be targeted at that use-case more specifically.

Nope.

Asahi supports up to the M3 line. Linux 7.4 supports M4 so surely Asahi will support it soon.

What is it about this MBP that makes it so much more preferable to an MBP with M3 Pro/Max?

  15 U.S. Code § 7 - “Person” or “persons” defined 

  The word “person”, or “persons”, wherever used in sections 1 to 7 of this title shall be deemed to include corporations

  https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/7

doubt