On the one hand: yes, $50 * 12 months would go a long way toward a machine upgrade, so it doesn't make a ton of sense purely on your-machine's-too-weak grounds.
On the other hand, I don't really run Chrome or Firefox on anything that operates on battery, because I don't like seeing the little battery icon deplete twice as fast, and it barely even matters how powerful the machine is (M1 helps, but there's still a noticeable difference). Maybe there are people who really, really want to run Chrome all the time, but also work mostly on portables and like them actually lasting as long on battery as they're supposed to. Maybe that's worth $50/m to them.
Good point. Decoding's usually pretty efficient, but you're right that use of wifi plus everything else related to this program might erase much of the power-savings.
On the other hand, I don't really run Chrome or Firefox on anything that operates on battery, because I don't like seeing the little battery icon deplete twice as fast, and it barely even matters how powerful the machine is (M1 helps, but there's still a noticeable difference). Maybe there are people who really, really want to run Chrome all the time, but also work mostly on portables and like them actually lasting as long on battery as they're supposed to. Maybe that's worth $50/m to them.