Laptops make tradeoffs by definition, but one of the largest has always been in graphics. Physics simply doesn’t allow for a high-end desktop GPU in a svelte, laptop-friendly form factor. And the lighter and thinner you make the portable, the less room you’ve got for an aggressive, power-hogging GPU. The promise of an external graphics dock is that you can eat your laptop steak and have it too, ...
Apple loves to position itself as being on the cutting edge of OS research and development, but its long-term support for graphics APIs it didn’t develop in-house has been generally terrible. macOS is still limited to OpenGL 4.1, which was released in July, 2010. To put this in roughly approximate terms, imagine if Microsoft had quit evolving its graphics APIs with DirectX 11.0 and still expected ...