What purpose does 13 inch ultrabooks fill...

What purpose does 13 inch ultrabooks fill? They're not powerful enough for gaymen or creative work when they don't have a dedicated GPU so you're basically paying $800-1200 for doing stuff you can do on a $300 Chromebook running Linux. The only valid use case I can think of is music production that doesn't require a powerful GPU.

depends

Macs: faggots
PCs: non-faggots

You would know the answer to this if you weren't a consumershit

not everyone wants huge screens on their laptop, when i was looking for my laptop 15" was just too big for my tastes.

Lightweight laptop with good battery life for Microsoft Office and email for office work.

Apple:
> m a c b o o k a i r

All other manufacturers:
> hey, if Apple can sell a e s t h e t i c shit for $700+, why can't we?

And thus, the ultrabook was born.

I bought a $600 13in ultrabook for school

You misread OP

He's not criticizing the concept of a small laptop, he's wondering why people pay shitloads for a small laptop that's only marginally better than a cheap small laptop

Then please enlighten me of all this professional work you do that doesn't require a dedicated GPU and can't be done with Linux

Try actually reading the OP instead, it's not about the screen size but the use case.

So you rather pay $800+ for that instead of getting a Chromebook that has even better battery life and weighs less? You do you, I guess

Firstly, Chromebook has limited functionality and no casual user is going to use or install that trainwreck of an OS that is Linux.
Secondly, $800 is nothing for anyone with a job.
Yes, I'd rather pay $800 for a fully functioning laptop.

I use a $300 chromebook.
All I need is a terminal and a web browser.

>Limited functionality
The Chromebook was literally made for web browsing, email and office work while having crazy battery life, why exactly do you need Windows to do that? And no, Microsoft Office is not an argument because Office has a web client.

>that trainwreck of an OS that is Linux

i just bought an xps 13 last week

for my use it does well with my multi-tabbed shitposting, youtube in hd (old laptop lagged like hell), banking, bills, shopping and the occasional game of cs:go or something. basically all I need in a lightweight, clean and simple platform

While they're very expensive, the hardware on the cheap end is just too weak. I have a ~$200 13" that's basically a netbook and it even struggles with the net sometimes. I'd love even a low-tier proper notebook processor and a bit more RAM in the same form factor but those really aren't a thing anymore. So I'm not surprised that some people just shell out in resignation.

You never know what software an office environment wants or require you to install. To limit the software you can use in future because of a few hundred dollars is retarded.
>inb4 use the work laptop
The work laptops are also full-fledged laptops running Windows because the companies are not retarded neets trying to save a few hundred bucks, they want to get jobs done quicker.

Because of segmentation

Every sub-$500 Chromebooks has a shitty 768 TN panel, eMMC storage, 4GB or less of ram, and Atom CPUs (becoming less of an issue though, Apollo Lake was good and Gemini looks really good).

I paid just under 800CAD for my UX305CA over a cheap Atom netbooks mostly because I didn't want a garbage screen, if I could have gotten a Chromebook without a garbage screen for less I would have. It is the best laptop I have owned so, only three complaints I have with it: Clickpad instead of touch pad with physical buttons, weak speakers, and lack of hardware VP9 decoding is an issue.

Also the iGPU is not that bad on ultrabooks for older games and these iGPUs will improve significantly as the lithography improves. I played plenty of older games on my Skylake Core M ultrabook and they played decently with the res at 720p and on low-medium settings. The biggest issue is the lack of memory bandwidth as my laptop only has DDR3-1600, I could see DDR4 2133 making 1080p possible. Kabylake got a significant boost to the GPU in Core M processors just from an improved process. I could see Cannonlake with Gen 10 graphics, on 10nm, and with faster LPDDR4X being decent (solid 60fps) at 1080p with medium settings on slightly older games. If Intel finally supports Freesync these Ultrabooks will be great general purpose laptops.

They're great for schoolwork and various likely tasks

Chromebooks have garbage screens. I paid $600 for a refurb Macbook Pro with a screen that doesn't burn my eyes to look at.

I get customers who tell me how great their ultrabooks are... Usually it's older women who couldn't imagine how they lived before their little shitbook that they've broken the hinges on, or dropped and paying a fuckton to fix it...

Its almost always the weight and size factor with them.. they can't seem to handle anything that weighs an ounce over the weight of their netbook. Nevermind the fact that all their shit is soldered in... Chromebooks never are an option either because even though all they do is facebook, it just won't do.

They are powerful enough for developer work. I have an XPS13 that I use for C and C++ dev (and OpenGL but not game engine stype stuff) through a Linux VM and its blazing fast.

Also the Intel GPUs are pretty decent for what they are, I play Tekken 7 and SFV on my laptop. They look ugly as fuck but they work. I travel a lot and I can at least play for a bit vs not being able to play at all on a desktop or a console.

Don't get me wrong they are really shitty games wrt anything except for classic gaming (emulators etc) but more than powerful enough for most software development.