The prices are not acceptable for you. Apple’s sales figures would seem to indicate that they have enough buyers for their products irrespective of their poorer price/performance ratio in some areas.
Performance/Watt is important in mobile devices, and of course in data centres. It will become more important in desktop systems if power costs continue to rise, but I agree that few people worry about this currently.
The only metric of importance is how well the tools perform for your given tasks, both in absolute performance and in reliability and maintenance overhead. Personally I’ve found Macs and macOS to work somewhat better for me than Linux and Windows machines that I have owned or used. Performance may have been slightly better on some Linux machines, but I sold these after getting newer Apple Silicon machines to replace them, and can’t be bothered with swapping platforms just to squeeze the last bit of performance unless the difference is huge and has financial implications.
for me, I value “lack of hassle” and “it just works” far more highly that raw performance. Macs & macOS are far from perfect, but overall they have required less software and hardware maintenance than other machines I have owned, and that is a big win. Anything that stops me focussing on actual task delivery is just a distraction. I don’t care about price that much.
