Re: Chromebooks, yeah, it’s nice to have a simple OS for simple computing. Too bad the underlying hardware is often so bad.
Re: The pricing: Memory and storage are large parts of the pricing now, yes, because of the AIpocalypse. It wasn’t always that way… just a few years ago, both were cheap and it was things like display quality and CPU/GPU that dominated the price more. So the pricing is more a function of the overall PC hardware marketplace supply and demand, with a bit of markup on top of it. That market was stagnant for a long time, with steady improvements and steady price decreases, until crypto and then AI drove up the costs of certain components like GPU and memory.
<side rant>
A particular issue with Chromebooks and Windows notebooks is that it’s kinda a three-way or four-way marketplace. Google and Microsoft are not primarily in the business of selling hardware directly to the end-user. While there were a few first-party attempts like the Pixelbook or Microsoft Surface, those are more like niche experimental reference designs than mass-market successes. By and large, their main customers are OEMs like Asus, Acer, Lenovo, and Samsung, along with ad and services partners (including those companies’ own internal partner-competitors, like their Gemini and Copilot departments that keep trying to squeeze AI into everything else). So you end up with a bunch of compromise machines that try to balance all these parties’ interests.
It’s a double-edged sword. You get healthy competition in the Chromebook marketplace with a lot of variants. But you also get a race to the bottom with the Asian OEMs all trying to reach a price floor, and cutting corners in hardware components when they cannot lower the price any further. So the market is mostly full of crap hardware that powers an otherwise nice OS, with a few premium exceptions.
That’s why the Apple stuff can feel a lot nicer. There, they’re primarily trying to optimize the machines for direct end-user satisfaction, both in the hopes that you’ll pay a premium for the hardware itself and that you’ll want to stick around in the Apple ecosystem overall and pay for their first-party services. But that vertical integration (and lack of third-party OEMs) means it’s a lot more straightforward for them to actually design and sell good computer systems as a holistic package that they control top-to-bottom. It tends to result in much higher quality hardware than Microsoft and Google’s fragmented approach where they stick their software on top of whatever commodity hardware the marketplace can supply them at the lowest prices.
</rant>
Yeah, if you do everything in the cloud anyway, you don’t really need much local memory or storage. You’d still benefit from a faster CPU, because, well, web apps are still apps, and they still use your computer. They run slower on slower computers.
As for ports, you’re probably not using Bluetooth for monitors (it doesn’t have enough bandwidth). Wireless displays do exist, but typically over wi-fi or some proprietary protocol, not Bluetooth, and even then the experience still sucks a lot compared to a hardwired cable.
Chromebooks are basically “dumb terminals” in a sense, but unlike the old mainframe days, today’s web apps actually do mostly run on the local machine, not the remote server, so your hardware still matters. Google never really makes that clear and it might not matter for the typical student or office drone who only ever has a Google Doc or two open. But in big spreadsheets or lots of tabs, or if you ever want to run other Android or Linux apps on it, hardware will still make a noticeable difference, like the OP noticed.
That’s not the case with the Android world (where other apps are still first-class citizens).