Well we pick on firmware but that's just my sidegig and personal potion.
We could go a bit further:
- ##There's whole communities of people writing music with their mobile gear with a lot of hardware produced exclusively for the mobile side (i.e compact keyboards and controllers)
- on the same note, photo editing, film editing, desktop publishing (Lots of people edit movies and quite professionally too for youtube etc)
- 3d printers/cam and homebrew devices are gettingy common, just a couple of hundred pounds now and whilst not as common as an epson yet its getting to the point where a lot of people know someone whos got one.
- development - not everyone's a coder but there's loads of people dabble with it at home, many are not iT Professionals and just do it for the love of things and create downloadable content where they're not doing original software
- automotive diagnostics - interesting one with the elm usb devices you can now do homebrew vehicle diagnostics with a variety of downloadable software. ill admit apps are starting to appear that are compatible but wasnt always the case
- anyone who runs their own business that uses any kind of proprietary business software or have any specific needs and works from their own device
- most non-browser based games - forget battlefield
- and a random one, if you just want to design a railway layout or link your controller to your pc
Now that list could go on, it really could, and not all the examples are great as new apps are coming out for things - but we don't need to focus on it that much more the issue that actually there's a lot of ordinary home users for which a chromebook or windows choice isn't really going to work, or at least be a suitable first choice.
Of course that's assuming from opening post that the context is having a chromebook instead of a windows machine. i'd happily have one alongside
'especially if they arn't very tech savvy and will rely on someone else to maintain it for themselves.'
My sister fell into this trap (Not with a chromebook though) it was an amazon fire iirc bought for my mum as she hates computers. It was far too closed off (Even more so than android) ad ridden and didn't have apps for what she wanted to use it for. Queue some awkward frustration as she was grateful for it but genuinely couldn't find a purpose - I managed to mod it to improve things a bit but on the quiet we got a laptop. in all fairness she dislikes that too but less.