They would still be better purchasing a used MacBook as you can find those at similar prices and they (assuming they aren't Intel) will have the long battery life and more.
replyARM PC laptops are on par with Macbooks in terms of battery life nowadays.
replyIs ARM Windows usable these days?
replyVery much so if you don't care about gaming. x86-64 emulation has already been great, and 99% of popular apps have native ARM64 versions. The only exception was Discord for me for a long time. I used to use an unofficial wrapper called "Legcord" instead. But, now even Discord has a native Windows version. I mostly use my laptop for software development + browsing.
replyI haven't tried gaming, but I feel like it'll suck for almost anything that's not natively ARM64. Steam doesn't have an ARM64 based client yet, AFAIK.
Isn't Discord just a web app? Why would you need an ARM64 specific version in the first place when you have a browser?
replyYour question is essentially "why do Electron apps exist?" and the full answer would be quite long.
replyThe most important one is that an app's lifecycle can be different than a web browser. You don't always keep a web browser open, but you might want to keep Discord open regardless of what you do with the web browser. That kind of lifecycle management can be tedious and frustrating for a regular user.
Discord's electron app has many features that its web app doesn't such as "Minimize to system tray", "Run at startup", "Game/media detection", "In-game overlays" etc.
Even PWAs can't have most of these features, so that's why we have to deploy an entire browser suite per app nowadays.