I dont really now how much the higher segment takes up but the higher margins is in high-end laptops. The high-end market really is much more important than you think. Its also about PR, high-end equals more PR to what ever company.
You're right, but in terms of how much effort manufacturers put into marketing and product design, you're definitely confusing high-end with high-performance. There are huge margins in
premium stuff but just look at any of the many available shipment trackers or marketshare summaries - the majority of the market is buying 15-25W laptops; Around 70% is ultrabook or cheap thin-and-light models, then 25% is budget plastic netbook crap.
Whether it's premium flagship gaming laptops like the Razer Blade or the cheaper chunky plastic models
where there isn't much profit - pricing is aggressive and margins are slim - gaming laptops and laptops with high-end processors are not even close to being as mainstream as your typical 15W ultrabook equivalent. For every one flagship gaming laptop sold with a 35-45W processor, there will be another 15 or so
flagship 'ultrabooks' sold without a GPU, and with a 15W processor. Think Dell XPS, HP Spectre, Surface Pro, Blade Stealth etc.
If you pay the same for an 8-core as a competing 4-core and it still has a great iGPU, is there anything to complain about?
Absolutely not! As long as the GPU isn't robbed of its power budget like it is with the Ryzen 2000U and 3000U series, then there are no downsides and it's a win-win
IMO mobile processors with integrated graphics are still too focused on CPU performance when it's graphics that usually limits them the most. Take the old 2700U - it's pretty mediocre as a CPU with it's four cores and 2.2GHz clock. Nonetheless, for the vast majority of people it's fast enough that they won't ever notice the CPU being a bottleneck in day-to-day use. Web browsing, office productivity, media playback, moving files around - the old and slow 2700U is fast enough (even when clamped down to 13W) that nobody is going to care what processor is actually in the laptop. Even media transcoding is something that most people have the cloud do for them now, rather doing it on their own CPU.
These 8C/16T processors will be great for video editors, 3D modellers, architects, engineers, and designers doing renders, and data analysts working on vast datasets. I'm not denying they'll love these new 35-45W Zen2 processors - but they are also not going to care about the IGP until they need to do a GPU-assisted task, in which case the IGP is too weak to be of use, so they'll definitely be buying something with a dGPU instead if they even have to work on a laptop instead of a desktop. The visualisation department at my firm refuses to do anything other than presentations on laptops. Even ignoring the huge performance gulf between a proper workstation and a laptop, they simply need more screen real estate, better connectivity, and more storage than a laptop can reasonably provide. That's why high-performance laptops are a small niche in the sales figures, and therefore why these HS and H APUs are not anywhere near as important to the market as the U-series which is where 95% of the money and marketshare is. As for the data analysts, I work with some of those and they use their Surface Pro to connect to their dataset on a remote server, via a web app. All the heavy lifting is done at a datacenter because that's how industry has moved on in the last few years.
reactions to our posts, maybe try arguing for your opinion? Getting angry at someone arguing against you isn't particularly compelling, and won't change anyone's mind. I would also suggest to stop the straw man arguments - neither of us ever expressed anything even remotely resembling a desire to benchmark anything "follow[ing] guidelines by Intel and Nvidia". Arguing like that is disingenuous; best case scenario it's a serious misunderstanding of what we said, worst case it's a deliberate attempt at making someone who disagrees with you look bad by painting us as biased. Either way, it only serves to make you look bad for doing it. Presenting arguments to back up your opinion is much better.
