When I was in the market for a new machine, I had the same attitude. As I was about to hit "Buy" on a standard issue $2k MBP, my wife said, "What if we got you a top of the line machine?"

I replied that it would make no sense unless I was going to start running local inference or training my own models locally...

2 years later, and this MacBook Pro M4 Max w/48GB is the best $4k I've ever spent!