I agree it’s not a very good deal. The phone works very well, my dad uses one heavily and it is very responsive. Battery life is so-so.

You are not loosing iMessage. Should read the article before writing nonsense

I have used one for heavy production till last year (i5 7200U) and it was slow but could manage coding and CAD. I am using one for personal use nowadays (8th gen i3, running Fedora), it is also very much fine.

For heavy workloads you definitely need more juice nowadays, but with the right software they are still fine. Windows getting bloated doesn’t help at all, I moved mine to Linux for this reason.