That’s a rather narrow set of use cases. For example, they are audio and video editing powerhouses. Audio in particular is exceptional because of core audio in MacOS.

And upgradable components aren’t something 95% of the population is worried about. Max out what you need when you buy it. My last Mac lasted 8 years with no trouble. And by the time I was ready to upgrade, the bottleneck was mainly the cpu, which in a case of 8 years, that means a new motherboard, and at that point you might as well upgrade the whole computer, as standards have changed and updated.

Apple silicon has a pretty decent on-board ML subsystem, you can get LLMs to output a respectable number of tokens per second off of it if you have the memory for them. I’m honesty shocked that they haven’t built a little LLM to power Siri

I have a colleague that spends 90% of their time out of the office on trains and on airplanes. They need to connect to an RDP server, answer emails, and do some InDesign work. Our IT dept manager has the same attitude as you and will only issue them a beefy laptop that weighs twice as much as a macbook and has half the battery. My colleague has tried to explain that compute power is not their primary concern but the IT manager won't listen because he doesn't have the perspective to imagine what it's like to do someone else's job.