This is the thing about Apple and why this sort of thing doesn't bother me. Overall, their hardware, at least their phones and notebooks, are relatively similarly priced to the competition with similar hardware. Then they charge buckets for all the accessories. But if you pay for those accessories, that's on you. It's not an Apple Tax, it's a Stupid Tax.
You can get a similar Android phone to the iPhone 12 for a third of the price. Perhaps even with newer chips and newer cameras. Apple has always been grossly overpriced.
Base priced Macbook Air is $1099. That's pretty relative to a lot of the competition. You can definitely find better deals, but let's not pretend it's more expensive than everything else in its class.
Are we defining class by relative power and capabilities? Cause if so, yeah Apple is absolutely overpriced.
I can almost guarantee you a more powerful machine of similar size and weight exists for 750-900 bucks outside of the Apple ecosystem. You're paying for the shiny metal construction and the name.
You won't get anything with as good build quality for that price and performance. You also won't be able to match the battery life, due to bad firmware/software.
In general you're pretty hard pressed to find a laptop that is all around as solid as a Macbook. Macbooks do pretty well across all categories... Good battery life, performance, screen, build quality, keyboard, trackpad, speakers, weight, size, etc... It's hard to find a competitor that provides close to as good of an experience on all factors at the same time. I don't have a Macbook at the moment because I prefer to run Linux and got my last laptop before the M1 came out... But it feels pretty hard to justify staying in Lenovo land these days.
I can get a decent windows or linux laptop for like $500. Each of the last two I got were in the $400 range, and they are still in use 3 and 5 years later. Plus I can easily upgrade the ram and ssd on those to further extend the lifespan.
If you want a usable device with 16gb ram and a 512gb SSD it's $1400 which is $300 (27% stupid tax) more than a comparable dell. Although I will admit the M1 chip in it will probably perform better at certain tasks.