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

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.