Mostly windows machines of comparable spec could be had for 10% less, but most importantly there were many OEMs willing to sell objectively bad underspecced machines that were 50-75% cheaper than the cheapest Mac. Remember the era when people had overheating laptops etc.
This is happening again now, with a new addition (well, resurgent) of insidious price cutting strategy: adware.
Ed Zitron goes into it in a recent article rant here[1] (skip to the "direct example" section if you're not interested in the rest of the read) where he reviews the best selling laptop on Amazon, which is ridiculously cheap... at a devil's bargain.
At this point it’s like the old story about boots - too poor to afford cheap ones.
Most people would be better served with a $600 Mac mini that will literally still be working & better in 5 years than in buying a $300 Amazon deal with 4GB ram which will run awful and die right outside warranty period. Maybe in a couple years apple will have prior year minis a little cheaper / refurbs available at $450-500ish too.
I just bought a $280 Acer laptop, still limited storage but better class, twice the ram, and with a CPU that actually has performance cores so it runs 2.5x-5x faster.
It came with chromeOS, which is a limiting factor, but in this particular comparison it sounds like it's more of an upside than a downside.
Price comparing Macs and PCs has rarely been accurate. The experts I remember would hammer the price difference and say Apple was dying so the investment isn’t worth it.
