I think you are correct. Most are individual cases. What I have seen more common and also my own experience are two things:
1. The boot time is longer than MacBook Pro by 15 to 20 seconds.
2. Direct after reboot/start the keyboard is laggy and may miss a character when you enter your password. After 5 or so seconds all is fine. Might be solved with a software update.
How often a day do you reboot and miss 25 seconds?
Personally I only have one thing left that irritates me:
When I have keyboard, trackpad, mouse and my AirPods connected via Bluetooth then have dropouts on the AirPods. If I turn off either keyboard or trackpad it seems to be fine. Seems to be fixable with software.
Mostly I have the AirPods connected to my phone anyway.
While I have these minor things in the overall perspective, at the end I love my Pro.
The speed is a joy with no noticeable slow down doing things in parallel (e.g. rendering and editing).
It’s the quietest computer since my 1982 Commodore 64 and beats the keyboard noise of that comparison
- wow what a journey it was ...
As a matter of fact it’s so quiet that it concerned me at the beginning. Rendering, activity monitor shows all 20 threads busy and I barely can’t hear anything. Did Apple screwed it up and my fans are not working and the CPU will go up in flames? Am I getting deaf?
The answer is: Apple nailed it! - ok we may need to wait 3 years to be sure on the long run.
It just looks sleek!
Was it an investment. Yes. But no regrets here so far. That’s all it matters in the discussion nMP, 8, 10 or 18 cores ...
I am sure you know why you are getting the 18 core and I will forecast that you will not be disappointed and will love it.
Good luck to all in exercising patience!