do you have a corp laptop with a dozen scanners like Carbon Black, Crowdstrike, etc. installed? My corp M4 Max with 48 GB is slower than my old M1 16GB machine by a large margin. I don't know what evil things those scanners do, but they're alwayus spinning like 35% CPU, and the M4 Max machine just drags..

You better check health of your machine then.

I have an M2 Pro MBP 16GB, compared to the latest MBP issued by my employer a couple months ago, I see zero difference in real world performance. Can’t speak for Office on Mac, I have not used it in over a decade, but for typical full stack web dev I literally don’t need anything more.

Sounds broken, somehow. The M1 iPad Pro I just traded in worked fine. Traded it for a Neo and the Neo does some stuff faster, but for day-to-day casual use, it's not notably different.