Academia and the real world are two different entities. Your main goal as a student is to memorize material and ace the test. Your main goal in the real world is to be as productive as possible for your company. Chromebooks are great learning tools to gather information while Macs are great productivity machines.
I'd say your are stuck back in the early '0x's.
Student is to learn, rote memorization is a standards cop-out. In college, that's what internships are also for.
I can do quite a bit on a CB especially with so much available via the cloud or Office 365 and Google.