You definitely shouldn't buy a $4000 computer if your only workload is web browsing.
If people listened to that advice Apple's stock price would be cut in half. 99% of Mac users can get along fine with the base m1 models.
I'v seen (more than once) Apple Store employees push people away from higher-end devices, or from buying devices altogether (happened with me) when they didn't think the bigger sticker price would serve the customer well, so at least apple is happy to give that same advice to their own customers.
I have seen this too. A woman wanted to buy an iMac Pro and after the sales guy heard her use case he kept saying the regular iMac was more than enough. She ended up getting that instead.
That may be because they don't carry most upgraded models and they want to push stock on hand.
pretty sure apple lives and dies by their iPhone sales. Sure, they sell a ton of computers, but it's nothing compared to their phone revenue. I wouldn't be surprised if there were activist investors who think they should drop the personal computer/laptop product lineup entirely
This would likely also affect their iPhone sales, so pretty bad plan.
Professionals are highly paid because of the tools they know. A Final Cut Pro pro isn’t going to switch to an off the shelf Linux or windows workstation and learn a whole new paradigm just because it’s cheaper. What I’m saying is the Mac platform is o be seen as a whole since some popular and useful Mac software like Final Cut isn’t cross platform.
Same goes if you prefer pages to word. Or software from Panic vs something else. The thing is if you’re most comfortable ale and productive on MacOS unless you build a hackintosh you need to buy a Mac and pay the mac tax but you get a whole integrated thing
I dabble in video editing and it seems most people work with Adobe Premiere Pro or Davinci Resolve. FCP has not been getting the love from Apple that it used to get. Same with Aperture vs Lightroom. I could be wrong though, but many people seem to be using cross-platform software on Macs, much more than a decade or two ago when it really was two different worlds.
You dabble. Pros are beholden to their tools. Some are experts at Premiere and others at FCP. Some even migrate to and fro but the mac has enough inertia here that they’ll still have the market enough to justify these insane chips and computers even if they are not pushing the software as hard as they are the hardware.
Likely mostly running the same workloads such as web browsing.
> ... and run different software.
Maybe if Apple wrote it. Otherwise you can run the same Chrome/Firefox, Photoshop and Office on a Windows or even Linux Machine. Most software is shared between platforms nowadays with posix/windows being the lowest common denominator in terms of "cross platform".