At least one of the macbooks is a macbook pro from the image in the article, so conservatively $3.5K in hardware? And $50 -- less than 1.5% of hardware price -- is too much money!

I'd say a specialized application like that provides well below 1.5% of the value that two Macbooks provide. But even if it wasn't:

    when CBS replaced my PC with a MacBook, giving me two-Mac setup

He didn't pay for the Macbooks, his employer did. So their price is irrelevant to this discussion.