[Thews]

A micro ryzen 5600U build with really bad quality components can be half the price of a mac mini with equal CPU performance. If you upgrade all of the mac specs you can probably get a larger divide, but IMO maxed out macs don't make much sense for most people.

[wtallis]

It's that focusing on one specific aspect of the system and compromising on everything else that produces the really big discrepancies. I tried to use PCPartPicker to spec out a rough equivalent of a maxed-out Mac Pro in terms of CPU cores, GPU performance, and RAM and SSD capacity, but still ended up at with at most a 3.5x disparity, and that's ignoring the GPU VRAM capacity limitation and features like Thunderbolt and 10GbE and assembly and warranty and support. If you want to assign $0 value to a large portion of a Mac's features then you can make it look wildly overpriced, but that's mostly an admission that it's the wrong product for your needs.

[Thews]

The years of the keyboard issues left a bad taste in my mouth, but I switched to a non mac laptop for my previous laptop and now I'm back again. The coupling of the OS and hardware really do make for a great user experience. I don't want to play games on my laptop, which is the only real use case where I hear valid complaints. I just need my dev environment and snappy research and communication.

A valid complaint from me is linux based container resource utilization. The only really good fix for that IMO is if apple did something like WSL2 or FreeBSD's linux ABI and had an efficient compatibility layer. For now I just run dev containers on my (linux) desktop.

[jb1991]

A 2X price difference is certainly believable, but I was responding to the suggestion of a 10X price difference.