Editing photos or reviewing them before getting back home to know if you need to re-shoot, reviewing 8K footage on the fly, applying color grading to get an idea of what the final might look like to know if you need to re-shoot, re-light or change something...
There are absolutely use-cases where this is going to enable new ways of looking at content and give more control and ability to review stuff in the field.
Adding to all the usecases listed by other commenters.
Having a higher performance per watt numbers also implies less heat from M1's perspective. This means that even if someone isn't doing CPU/GPU heavy tasks, they are still getting better battery life since power isn't being wasted on cooling by spinning up the fans.
For some perspective, My current 2019, 16inch i7 MBP gets warm even if I leave it idling for 20 - 30 mins and I can barely get ~4hrs of battery life. My wife's M1 macbook air stays cool despite being fanless, and lasts the whole day with similar usage.
The point is performance per watt matters a lot in a portable device, regardless of its capabilities.
Try disable turbo and search around there is an utility that keep no turbo and using hours still 50 degree.
I am not associated with that guy. In fact I bought one for even my macmini. Get my m1 macmini to avoid all these hot air.
If you run biotcamp windows has registry to disable that and also system setting to limit to 99% (but seem still hot) for my playing with Vr and fs2020 using external egpu.
For the content creator class that needs to shoot/edit/upload daily, while minimizing staff, I can see definite advantages to having a setup which is both performant and mobile.
honestly half hour on plug every 4 hours of work sounds mobile enough to me.
I worked in the content creators business making videos, photos and music and frankly the need for 15 hours of battery is a (very cool indeed) glamorous IG fantasy.
In reality even when we were really on the move (I used to follow surfers on several isolated beaches in South Europe) the main problem were the phones' batteries - using them in hotspot mode seriously reduce their battery life - and we could always turn on the van's engine and use the generator to recharge electronic devices.
Post processing was done plugged to the generator.
Because it's better to sit comfortably to watch hours of footage or hundreds of pictures.
I can't imagine many other activities that are equally challenging for a mobile setup.
I am often rendering and coding while traveling for work a few months out of the year. Even when I’m home, I prefer spending my time in the forest behind my house, so being able to use Blender or edit videos as well as code and produce music anywhere I want is pretty sweet.
GPUs are no longer special purposes components; certainly in macOS, the computation capabilities of the GPU are used for all sorts of frameworks and APIs.
> In this scenario, would you render things in a cafe? Why not?
honestly, as a traveler and sometimes digital nomad, the real question is "why yes?"
There is no real reason to work in a cafe, except because it looks cool to some social audience.
Cafes are usually very uncomfortable work places, especially if you have to sit for hours looking at the tiniest of the details as one often does when rendering.
