This is a shock to clueless CEOs who have never spoken to anyone forced to buy Chromebooks outside of enterprise agreements where nothing matters to either side except the number of zeroes on the invoice.
Our small business has had about 30 people on Chromebooks for about five years now. These have, generally, been great - most of them cost less than AUD$700, though they've gotten more expensive.
We've been buying Intel i5 CPUs with 8GB of RAM. These run most stuff with no problems.
But in true PC style, what the manufacturers have done is make a billion different models with different specs such that there is actually a dramatic difference in performance between them. You can buy something with an AMD CPU with 4GB of RAM and it's a piece of shit - but you won't know until you get it home and try it, because you just bought "a Chromebook".
We started buying i7/16GB models from Dell - these ones fly and are great. But then they simply stopped selling them. For two years they couldn't tell me what their Chromebook strategy was, because they only care about schools.
I think Apple will clean up here by making it simple - there are a small handful of models that are easily differentiable. They're Apple branded so they will be immediately more coveted than a random Chromebook thing.
I'll be buying some of these to replace our aging Chromebooks for sure. Keen to see how they go.
It's a shame because the i7/16GB Chromebooks are awesome to use.
