[p1necone]

I'm not sure why you're phrasing that math as if it somehow shows it was a bad idea. It is in fact possible to be able to afford a small monthly cost, but not have enough in the bank to immediately drop ~$1500 on a laptop, especially if you're just starting your career.

According to you they paid roughly the same amount as it would have cost to buy laptops and upgrade them relatively frequently, but amortized over much smaller monthly installments.

And their system would have been elastically upgradeable.

On top of that holding on to money and spending it later is generally better than spending it now, because $X is usually worth > X future $ because of inflation/lost ability to invest.