People (consumers) see the Mac prices and balk because they're comparing to the Acer Aspire they can buy at BestBuy on discount for $300.
Businesses see the Mac prices (and, barring upgrades): they see that they're cost competitive with the contemporaries.
Dell XPS, HP Elitebook, Lenovo Thinkpad Txx (or Carbon X1) are all in spitting distance and in some cases even more expensive than Macbooks.
That's before you even talk support contracts or yearly licenses (the OEM license on the unit is rarely the one you'll use, usually you have a volume license and a KMS server which also costs a lot of money).
Also, when it comes to management for a small or even medium sized business, look at Apple's approach to management: https://www.fleetsmith.com . Dead simple pricing, dead simple UI, and they provision your devices out of the box without any manual setup. You can just buy 50 MacBooks, Apple will automatically ship them set up to your employees for no charge, and you'll pay a several bucks a month per device for management.
Now compare that to how you manage a Windows deployment. By comparison, it's unintelligible. You need to upgrade every device to Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise as part of a contract to join a domain, set up a domain server with Active Directory to have a user store, add connects to connect the Directory to the Domain which may or may not require a Windows Server, which may or may not require the arbitrary Windows Server CALs, and then you have to manually set up and wipe each device out of the box unless you managed to get a special deal with the OEM...
As I found with Lenovo and their bizarre continued use of 1080p as a baseline everywhere in CURRENT_YEAR, if you specifically go looking for laptops with even just 1440p displays the prices quickly inflate towards Apple levels.
...it even has a bigger screen and hard drive!
Nowadays macs are the nightmare of every IT department, the smallest that on a PC takes a couple of minutes, like changing an hard drive or a RAM module, it's a major surgery on a mac, where it's still possible and where you don't get all the things soldered on the main board.
You have an OS problem on a mac? Good luck wasting hours reinstalling the operating system manually and then installing all the software. On Windows? You have your custom install ISO with all the drivers and software you need and you install it automatically. Or just have a stack of cloned disks, and in case of a problem just swap the hard drive, in most enterprise computers that have everything tool less is basically the fastest way.
Also Windows machines are usually favorites by the IT departments because they work well with all the Active Directory stuff, meaning that you can manage everything centralized. Yes, you can even on a mac join an Active Directory domain, but you can do less things than with a Windows machine.
And surely you have to develop a lot of custom tooling to administer network made by macs, while on Windows you can do that with standard tooling.