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!
The 16/256 M4 MacBook Air costs 850€ including 19% vat here in DE, so your numbers are way off or you live somewhere with very unfortunate peicing in the eu.
Certainly not from the Apple Store, where it's 1.199,00€.
Cheapest, I found was about 1000€. Buying a one-off offer from some random webshop, means you would have to deal with them in case of repairs or warranty issues.
And yeah, effectively max. 200GB non-upgradable SSD storage, certainly makes cheap offers likely, cause that's borderline unusable for almost everyone, who needs more than a web browser.
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.
I buy Macbooks with Applecare as a self-employed contractor (so no VAT and expense is tax deductible). I sell it after 2-3 years (before apple care expires!) on ebay and you would actually make a profit if I would not tax-declare it. What I personally do not do, as that would be tax evasion. But I've heard of people who don't do that and basically use Macbooks for free/with a profit. Especially since Germany changed the write-off period from 3 years to 12 month recently.
I wouldn't expect an Apple product to last that long… This is from my personal experience and also family members who tried Apple, so your mileage may vary, I just wouldn't trust it.
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.
Every iMac, Mac Pro, MacBook Air, Mac Mini and MacBook Pro I’ve had (for me and family) has been indestructible.
A few months ago Spotify on an ancient Intel Mac mini in the living room started complaining that the new version of Spotify is no longer compatible with that Mac. Then I ran Open Core and updated the MacOS to a much newer version, and Spotify is happy. Now I’ll get even more years out of that machine.
I still expect Mac and Thinkpad hardware to last a decade, sans their batteries. A good desktop PC made from better parts will also endure without much effort.
