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What I see is most Mac owners that buy out of their own pocket have the basic models. And the team-leaders / management types always bight the overpriced stuff because the company is paying. (It mildly hacks me off when I see this in academia, where most research is publicly funded.)

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Academics (like other knowledge workers) are fairly well paid, so making them waste time by using crappy equipment does nobody any favours.

In academia — or at least in STEM and the social sciences — quite a lot of people need a somewhat high-spec machine (e.g. to run quantitative models on large data sets, compile code, process large LaTeX documents, etc).

And the basic model Macs generally come with woefully little RAM and rather small SSDs. So I'm not sure it's reasonable to be hacked off.

Computer purchasing in Academia is strictly controlled by procurement rules and other types of regulations. One magic number is $5000- universities normally doesn't charge overhead for capital investments above this, but the full purchase has to be done at the same time. This means that I'm not allowed to buy RAM separately from the computer.

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