Currently using a 2012 macbook pro, with a 512gb ssd, and 16gb sticks. It's more than enough power for I'd say 99% of what people use computers for (ms office, adobe suite, some cad, light dev work, etc.) These days its not hard to call upon compute from the heavens priced by the second should you need more horsepower.

My spinning-rust 24” iMac from 2011 mostly manages to trundle along with Linux Mint on it for my partner to use. LibreOffice and Firefox for web browsing, mostly.

Anything more than that and it chokes. Too many tabs, it chokes. Too many software updates, woo boy does she choke. That poor machine!

Sure it can

I actually disagree, but I take your point. A better product needs to make a real difference for the price. Right now, 16gb of ram costs $250 (cad) more than base model. 512gb ssd costs $250 more than base model. The likelihood I'd ever see those gains, compared to the likelihood I'd be able to use more storage, is wildly different. The product as a whole is better, but the individual upgrades you'd be absolutely limited by cost much more than they should. For example, a 1TB ~5GB/s read/write capable NVMe SSD off-the-shelf can be had for under $200. That's just a bit ridiculous. I'm not going to get the same utility between those two examples for the ~$4-500 price difference.

If I did have endless money, or my regular work was heavily IO bound, then it wouldn't change anything, except I'd be much more willing to ignore how much it costs.

...just don't compare GPU benchmarks. Or any SIMD operations, for that matter.