To my way of thinking, this is exactly the blind spot: ... they are anemic on memory and storage, making them subpar for intense multitasking, or getting certain types of work done.
Look at the iPad Pro, 2GB of memory, not a "laptop" class CPU. etc. It is eating into Microsoft's market for the same reason. The "big" part of the laptop wedge is people who aren't gamers, or intense multitaskers, or intense local storage users. They are people who have their stuff in the cloud, want an easy to carry package that can run the apps they need to run one, or perhaps two, at a time.
The Chromebook is anticipating the iOS based, ARM processor based Macbook air. This is also the Surface Go space.
The Surface Go is, on that note, a wonderful machine, though I feel one with too many compromises to hit mainstream right now. At 10" it hits the portability of a tablet, while the keyboard is good enough for real usage, not just in a pinch.
The Surface Go 2 will be a thing to watch. If they can get it running on ARM with flawless x86-64 translation, roll the price point down a hundred dollars (or just bundle the keyboard - come on, Microsoft, selling that separately makes _no_ sense here) and ship it with a dongle that turns one USB-c port into 2 usb ports, charging, and a displayport, and what you'll have is a 10" laptop that's fully functional, runs _everything_, trivially integrates into a desktop-like environment for home use, is a passable tablet, and gets all day battery life.
Right now it's _close_ to being able to achieve that, but the battery life is a bit too short and the price a bunch too high, and a switch to ARM could alleviate both of those issues.
Back in my day 2 GB was an unimaginably large amount of RAM, and our computers could still do many of the things they can do today.
I recall an article in Byte magazine which talked about when we'd have computers with a gigabyte of RAM (but it also noted that at the time you could have had a gigabyte, given in a mere cubic foot of hardware).
If I were at Apple building it, I wouldn't have it run any MacOS apps, just iOS apps. There are lots of articles about how that would happen, see[1] as an example.
Look at the iPad Pro, 2GB of memory, not a "laptop" class CPU. etc. It is eating into Microsoft's market for the same reason. The "big" part of the laptop wedge is people who aren't gamers, or intense multitaskers, or intense local storage users. They are people who have their stuff in the cloud, want an easy to carry package that can run the apps they need to run one, or perhaps two, at a time.
The Chromebook is anticipating the iOS based, ARM processor based Macbook air. This is also the Surface Go space.