The thing with laptops in my experience is a) they last ~6 years (macs at any rate) so that's ~$100/year or 27c a day and b) people spend a lot of time on them, hours a day often. Is it really worth cutting back much on that when it's like 1/10th the cost of getting a cup of coffee?

Well but that's the thing. It is priced like a phone for exactly the kind of person who would spend 600 bucks on a phone. I don't think this is a coincidence.

In terms of performance the raw compute people have in their pockets nowadays surpasses what they typically need by magnitudes for a while now. Granted: programmers and tech companies find new ways of wasting that compute on features that people ultimately do not need, so they may need that the compute so things feel snappy, but if I think about what my parents do on their devices you could easily enable them to do theirs tasks with far less. They are essentially doing the same as ca. 2006 with pictures and videos being higher fidelity & resolution and websites running hundred thousand lines of javascript being the main difference.