You know, it's not always, but apple does sell things that are price-competitive with similarly performing competing products.
Some iterations of the Mac Mini have been hard to beat with a tiny PC with similar performance.
The M1 MacBooks had some surprisingly cheap options for the relatively premium laptops they were.
Samsung's Ultra phones tend to cost more or less the same as the Apple Pro Max phones.
The main difference is sometimes just that Apple doesn't make low-end or low-mid-range, or sometimes not even anything below "relatively high-end" products in a particular category.
Can confirm on the MacBook side. My girlfriend got a m series macbook and it's better than anything in it's price range. That device is so snappy while having a battery life that's incomparable to anything with windows
I've owned 4 MacBooks. A white plastic one, a 13" MBP, a 15" MBP, and now a 15" M2 Air.
I've had the Air for a year and I still can't wrap my head around how it's technically in a class below the fully specced 15" 2015 MBP, but outperforms it in literally every way. Don't get me wrong, I understand that, even without Apple Silicon, computer tech jumped on in leaps and bounds in the 8 years between my last two, but the performance difference is astonishing.
Sure, it's a lot of money for an 'entry level' laptop, but this fucker is going to last me ten years or more. When Apple no doubt drop OS support for it in a few years, Asahi Linux will almost certainly be rock solid enough to fully replace macOS.