A lot of times it may be due to their experience with workstations. I didn’t really see a nice workstation until my first professional job at a newspaper. Before that it was all institutional grade Dells attached to budget peripherals. You could take a break after logging in while the computer got itself in a useable state. Their were some labs on campus that had better machines, but you generally had to have a reason to use them.

Meanwhile my core duo MacBook absolutely killed it.

Now, for personal use I’ve pretty much switched to a workstation that I built as a windows gaming machine, that accidentally works great as a coding and design machine as well.