I have to disagree - the baseline models satisfy the needs of many casual consumers and the price point puts it within their reach. For $600, most of us could give this to our parents and it would be great for 7-10 years.
For those who need more performance, better value is found at higher rungs of the product lineup, and this has been Apple's strategy for decades.
Think you should try some of the machines they ship in that range, for a long time the lowest rung was 8gb memory and 128gb storage, meaning you had a machine that booted with around 30-40 gb free for the end user which would then rapidly get eaten into as swap space when browsing then you'd hit the "Out of memory, close applications" freeze up.
For those who need more performance, better value is found at higher rungs of the product lineup, and this has been Apple's strategy for decades.