> Given Apple's historically very premium pricing, launching such an affordable product is certainly a shock to the entire market

No? Apple has been delivering way cheaper laptops ever since M1, this one is just even cheaper. I thought PC execs were asleep at the wheel but not this bad.

"Of course, it's not that it cannot do all the work, but considering user experience and those hardware limitations, the experience, I think, differs significantly from mainstream products..."

I worked in retail for a decade, a lot of that was selling computers. The vast majority of what people buy computers for could be done a toaster. You don't exactly need top end specs to browse the internet, reply to emails, and write the occasional document.