>finance’s requirement to keep costs under control
Apple is offering some great value for the money with the M4 chip now, the Mac Mini is $600 and the 13" MacBook Air is $1k.
The real killer is of course the corporate monitoring software and bloated endpoint security suites, we can all point to dozens of coworkers as the reason these exist, and unfortunately as far as I know of there's no corpos that do an "idiot test" to allow people who have demonstrated computer literacy and compliance with corpo security policy to be placed in a less restrictive group.
A Raspberry Pi with an SSD is much snappier than the newest and much more powerful business-grade laptops our employees are issued with all the bloatware on them.