Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends how you frame it; in my eyes, I'd be paying $1.4k USD after sales tax (at least here in the EU) for a laptop with measly 16 gigs of RAM… I could buy two normal laptops to outperform that for a price of one!
If you use the $1.4k USD laptop for 2 years, that works out to around $2 / day. If it’s a Mac, it probably has some resale value at the end of the time bringing the cost down closer to $1 / day. For a work machine, that’s pretty easy to justify.
Ignoring that though, if work machine means an Excel machine, then it's probably overspending IMO. If work machine means workstation, then you'd probably rather want one of the >1.6k models with more working memory… or just don't go Apple.