What I gather is that the base model MBA is actually very competitively priced, and it’s the price of the spec upgrades that drive it over the price of an equivalently specced windows laptop. But where ultrabooks are concerned, intel still hasn’t caught up with M1, build quality often isn’t as nice (though this can be subjective), and well, windows is windows.
So at the end of the day, I find I am not really paying that much more than a windows computer. That I can also tap on the education discount further sweetens the deal a little more.
If the base model is enough for you, then yeah, but we were talking about spec upgrades.
If I were to buy a computer today I might like at least 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD to really make this thing future proof and not rely on external HDs and the cloud for everything. If I were to buy a T14 AMD that would cost me £176 extra, while Apple charges £600. How is that not highway robbery?
Others are right, of course, that it's always been this way. That doesn't make it less ridiculous.