Top 10% of global earners (~800M people) can afford a $2,000 device without major financial strain.
Top 25% (~2B people) could afford it with some budget adjustments.
Bottom 50% (~4B people) would find it prohibitively expensive.
So for a SV top income, maybe that might look more like the weekly pet brushing budget, but for most people out there this is not that much of a no-brainer.
The maths changes if you're working for yourself. Because I live in Europe, I've ended up working as a contractor due to the lack of a legal entity in my country. While that mostly sucked for a bunch of reasons, I was able to get a 64Gb Mac M2 a few years back with approximately a 52% discount, which was kinda nice.
If you're working for yourself paying monthly is exactly the same as amortising an asset. Personally I'd rather my business just pay $100 a month than have to deal with additional hardware and software maintenance while using a depreciating asset that is break-even after 3-5 years depending on the spec.
