It’s probable their needs will grow beyond minimal, especially with Apple intelligence
Yeh, well, I am one of those jockeys. Predicting future needs is a game fraught with errors, mistakes and overall failure. My computing needs have not increased 10% in the last 5 years, if that much. I am not going to spend three, four, five hundred dollars more today for something I will more than likely not need.
The myth of Apple intelligence is just that. No one knows what it will take, if anything. It may run on servers, it may run in the GPU, it may not run at all. Apple intelligence is certainly not going to obsolesce millions of laptops or desktops overnight.
I worked at the University of Tennessee for 14 years. My experience on computer use, except for specialized courses, is that computer use was mostly WEB, some documents, a spreadsheet or two. Engineering courses and math courses needed Matlab. Even with that software the computing needs were relatively modest. Files were stored on school servers, not on the actual student's computer. Local storage was lightly used. I suspect that for most college students a Chromebook would serve quite well.
I have a M4 Pro, not because I needed it, but because I wanted it. I wanted TB5, I wanted extra ports, I wanted the high speed SDXC card support, the 24 GIG 1TB is what Apple had in the store. I bought it. I do professional sports photography. I take several thousand images per event. I use LR and PS and have never had an issue with performance. Even when I had my M2 Air which I took on the road which performed extremely well. Images are stored in the cloud, for recovery, for safety, and for others to access. The high speed SDXC card slot is probably the biggest benefit. I use less than 150 GIG of storage.
