Based on all the tests I have seen I don’t think your advice adds up Robert. People with top of the line intel Macs are seeing them crushed by the M1 in professional workflows. E.g. video encoding is over twice as fast on an M1 compare to a full spec iMac with 40 GB RAM. The Mac Pro 16 inch is not going to stand a chance.

As for compilation, that is not graphics card dependent so your advice there is odd. The M1 will crush almost any intel CPU in current Macs and memory transfer speeds is 3x that of intel Macs which will significantly affect compilation speeds.

You say Intel Macs are better in scientific workflows. Again how do you know this or why do you assume this based on graphics card performance? The neural engine which benefits typical machine learning tasks give about 15x higher performance than a Mac without it.

Other than a need for more ports or larger screens and less software compatibility issues there is really no point in getting Intel Macs anymore. Especially for professionals as raw CPU power, hardware based video encoding and stuff like neural engine will give an edge in professional settings