If a laptop makes an employee 1% more efficient, that has returns of $2k/year to the employer for an employee whose cost is $200k/year. Note that cost >> salary, so this corresponds to perhaps a $100k salary.

Reliability is king. A failed device will typically cost thousands of dollars in lost productivity, IT costs, etc. A device which fails at a critical moment can have almost arbitrary costs.

From a business perspective, Apple, Latitude / Precision / XPS, and Thinkpads are usually the only devices which make sense.

From a home perspective, there are plenty of $200 machines which get the job done. That's one of Apple's problems.

Another one is that most businesses spent a lot on upgrades during COVID, and those machines are still within their lifecycle. As we're entering a predicted recession, delaying upgrades is the #1 thing to go. Layoffs also mean there's a glut of machines (there's a ton of nice off-lease stuff on refurbished web sites right now at bottom-barrel prices; I saw a Precision laptop with 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Xeon, and NVidia Tesla for under $500 a few weeks back).

That's more the OS scheduling and userspace software than actual hardware. I don't experience any lag even on my father's 10yr old laptop.