> I am a computer professional. I never even considered using the low end MacBook. I imagine all other professionals also disregarded it.
I am a computer professional. I was delighted to get the 2016 MacBook. I imagine plenty, though not all, other professionals also use it -- in fact I see them doing so. I'm also not pompous or insecure enough to feel that there is some sort of magic dividing line between "real" computing folks and mere "consumers".
I must admit I build only small programs with Xcode, doing most of my development in Emacs, doing some compiles locally and much heavy lifting remotely. I have one large simulator that can only run for a few thousand steps locally, but I can happily run it on AWS.
On the other hand it's super-portable, perfectly powerful for the C, C++, Lisp, Java and Rust development I need it for; it runs web browsers, various clients etc perfectly well.
Perhaps if you have to do a lot of image or video editing it wouldn't be enough. It's hard to say, since I used to do editing on a shared 2.5 MIPS mainframe; on the other hand you wouldn't make a modern movie on a MacBook Pro. But you probably write such a program on a machine far less powerful than the users need.