Personally I think it will be a big headache for HP, people can be hard on laptops and HP is already not excited about consumer support (i.e. mandatory 15 minute wait time for support calls). But if they make it work, I think there's probably a good number of people who feel like they need a laptop but don't care so much about the specifics and want to keep their costs low (as all of their costs appear to be rising right now).
For consumers who don't replace their laptops on a schedule it makes less sense.
RAM was this price some years back, and yet last summer/fall it was at an all-time low.
Competition.
Will we continue to see steady improvement in top quality CPU/GPUs? Would they even bother releasing consumer versions of ram faster than DDR5?
(A large factor here is, obviously, the cloud. With photos, documents, e-mail, IMs, etc. all hosted for cheap or free on "other people's computers", the total hardware demands on the end-user computing device is much less. Think storage, not just RAM.)
It's true even in tech; half a year ago I switched my phone to a Galaxy Z Fold7, and I haven't used my personal laptop since then, not once. I have a separate company laptop for work, and I occasionally turned on my PC, but it turns out that a foldable phone is good enough to do everything on personal side I'd normally use a laptop for. So here I am, with my primary compute device I don't have full control over - and yes, I'm surprised by this development myself, and haven't fully processed it yet.
It's a deeply flawed comparison, because many of the things we do with a phone now wasn't something we'd do at all with the computers we grew up with. We didn't pay at the grocery store with a computer, we didn't buy metro tickets, we didn't use it to navigate (well, there was a short period of time where we might print out maps, but anyway..)
When I grew up, I feel like our use of home computers fell into two categories:
1. Some of us kids used them to play games. Though many more would have a Nintendo/Sega for that, and I feel like the iPhone/iPad is a continuation of that. The "it just works" experience where you have limited control over the device.
2. Some parents would use it for work/spreadsheets/documents ... and that's still where most people use a "real" computer today. So nothing has really changed there.
There is now a lot more work where you do the work on services running on a server or in the cloud. But that's back to the original point: that's in many cases just not something we could do with old home computers. Like, my doctor can now approve my request for a prescription from anywhere in the world. That just wasn't possible before, and arguably isn't possible without a server/cloud-based infrastructure.
Phones/tablets as an interface to these services is arguably a continuation of like those old dumb terminals to e.g. AS/400 machines and such.
> It's true even in tech; half a year ago I switched my phone to a Galaxy Z Fold7, and I haven't used my personal laptop since then, not once.
I do agree, I am in a similar situation.
> [...] my doctor can now approve my request for a prescription from anywhere in the world. That just wasn't possible before [...]
I'm picking nits, but wasn't this more or less instantaneous approval possible before with e.g., a fax and a telephone? Or (although this is a bit of a stretch) a telegram and telegraph?
There is a reason I have a server in my basement - it lets me edit files on my phone (if I must - the keyboard is and screen space are terrible compromises but sometimes I can live with it), laptop (acceptable keyboard and screen), or desktop (great keyboard, large screen); it also lets me share with my wife (I haven't got this working but it can be done). I have nearly always had a server in my house because sharing files between computers is so much better than only being able to work on one (or using floppies). The cloud expands my home server to anywhere in the world: it offloads security on someone else, and makes it someone else's problem to keep the software updated.
There is a lot to hate about the cloud. My home servers also have annoyances. However for most things it is conceptually better and we just need the cloud providers to fix the annoyances (it is an open question if they will)
iPad awas the perfect device for her (I've touched one perhaps twice, in my entire lifetime).
Meanwhile my much more expensive laptop mostly interfaces with applications that primarily exist on servers that I have no control over, and it would be nearly worthless if I disconnected it from the Internet. Your central point is right, the economics are concerning, but I think it's been a ship slowly sailing away that we're now noticing has disappeared over the horizon.
The niche is still there, probably as big as it was before. For example, as I grew weary of being subject to services I have little control over, I set up my own home server using a refurbished PC. It has been an amazing journey so far. But I don't think a normie would ever get interested in buying a refurbished Dell, install Debian on it, and set up their own services there.
As long as there is a niche of people interested in buying their own computers, there will be companies willing to fill that niche.