You are seriously overestimating how much computing power people need and underestimating the capabilities of those laptops.
My previous experience with low-end intel hardware has been universally negative, so I assumed the i3's are terrible. Passmark says they are far better than I would have guessed:
M1 performance at 4x the wattage.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-12100
So, either these get hot and are power-outlet-dependent, or they throttle badly.
I wonder if suspend / resume works reliably. It did not for the last 4 intel laptops I owned, regardless of OS. That included Windows, MacOS and Linux.
Maybe the AMD ones are decent. It's a shame about the screen (and bizarre bios) though.
In a world full of low end garbage windows machines, it actually makes them a pretty nice little niche. Lots of consumers would likely find them much better than a lot of the $1-200 more expensive Windows laptops.
How do you define "reasonable"? My Asus Chromebook has this display, which I find very reasonable for work:
- 14” LED-backlit Full HD (1920 x 1080) 16:9 display
- Four-way NanoEdge display with 85% screen-to-body ratio
- 4.9mm-thin side bezel and 7mm bottom bezel
- Wide 100% sRGB color gamut
- 178° wide-view technology
Probably all three at the same time.
My benchmark is "can this play an HD Youtube video full screen". Many cheap Windows laptops will struggle at this task, but with remote education in the state that it's at, that would make life very hard for its users.
I've also seen laptops go from usable to unusable because everyone switched codecs and suddenly the hardware acceleration didn't work anymore.
I think an i3 with a modest amount of RAM is a good decision for a baseline. You can get away with less, but you'll have to constantly maintain your laptop to do so, tweaking settings as the computer ages and acceleration support dies out. For most people, the device will just slow down to a crawl.
An i3 and 8GB of RAM are technically overspecced today, but in five years time you'll be happy you didn't buy the Celeron.
Most people absolutely NEED better than a pentium 4.
There's not a single cheap Windows laptop that will even vaguely 'struggle' at this task given that the video decode is hardware accelerated. Even a RPI can manage that task. I have set-top box PCs with dual core Celeron 1037U processors which are more than ten years old which don't 'struggle' at this task even if you throw them a x265 video which their hardware decode ASIC doesn't support.
Most of Google's apps will, come to think of it.
A laptop has to have more.
Try it out in a VM, open 10+ pages from your bookmarks.
Purely out of curiosity, what do
ps -A -osize,cmd | awk '/[g]nome/{t+=$1}END{print t/1024^2 "GiB"}'
print on your machine?
So many web sites now have multiple hundreds of MBs in payload when you visit. I agree that 8GB is the bare minimum.
It's sad :(
I don't think your experience is generalizable.
So you're a bit off.