Anyone who is serious about ML (and by serious I mean like actually training fairly big models with lots of data for a project or as part of their job) is going

Anyone who is serious about ML (and by serious I mean like actually training fairly big models with lots of data for a project or as part of their job) is going to use cloud resources or at least have a decent gpu(s) at home. At no point will they ever look at getting a laptop to do ML one. Not only are you going to pay extra for less performance, but even with CPUs (which are still important for ML since you need to not only do the matrix math on GPUS but also prepare the datasets and set up the GPUs), you are not going to reach even close to the power that desktop chips can put out in any laptop with any manufacturer. As for general targeting of engineers the history of MBP pretty shows that they don't really care. Things like virtual escape key on the touchbar, shitty keyboards with sticking keys, hardware designed to not be reparable, and more recently, releasing the M1 models with a spotty backwards compatibility of software out the door is really not something that would be done if you were targeting tech minded people.