There's still a huge market for people who want higher end hardware and to run workloads locally, or put a higher price on privacy. For people who want to keep their data close to their chest, and particularly now with the AI bloom, being able to perform all tasks on device is more valuable than ever.
A Chromebook "does the job" but it's closer to a thin client than a workstation. A lot of the job is done remotely and you may not want that.
Yes, but for those people if you consider the price of a fully loaded MacBook Pro it is a rather small win considering all the limitations.
If the only thing you care about are battery life (only if you plan to use it lightly on the go, because even the high-end Apple Silicon sucks decent amount of power at full tilt) and privacy I guess they are decent enough.
This is my argument: the base models are at the same time overkill and too limited considering the price and the high-end models are way too expensive for what they bring to the table.
Apple has a big relevancy problem because of how they put a stupid pricing ladder on everything, but that is just my opinion, I guess.
As long as they keep making a shit ton of cash it doesn't matter, I suppose.
But if the relevant people stop buying Macs because they make no sense, it will become apparent why it matters sooner or later...
Not at all, a Chromebook let's you run Linux apps. I can run full blown IDEs locally without problems. And yes, that is with 8Gb ram, ChromeOS has superb memory management.
Well, Google developed and deployed MGLRU to Chromebooks long before upstreamed it. Plus they use some magic to check the MGLRU working set size inside the VMs and balance everything.
A Chromebook "does the job" but it's closer to a thin client than a workstation. A lot of the job is done remotely and you may not want that.