> Is it a luxury product or an entry level one?

Obviously: Both.

The absolute "entry" point is the Mac mini.

The MacBook Air a low spec "luxury" quality device for people who want a well built laptop (that has decent battery life and a good screen) but do not have heavy demands on performance.

If your argument is discounts then I don't support that pricing model (unpredictable frenetic oscillation) anyway.

And, yah, if you're a company you get a flat rate discount based on volume with Apple products.

I bet the hardware will be working 10 years from now as well. Apples tends to use great hardware even if it is sometimes a little underperformative compared to PCs at the same price point.

I hesitate to say such a thing given the keyboard fiasco and the time nvidia sold them a batch of GPUs that got so hot they desoldered themselves.

I have a MacBook from 2011 that works perfectly well (almost as good as the day I got it, save the battery and a few bits of corrosion on the edge of the front where your palms rest). I’ve definitely cycled through other laptops much faster than that.

my 3 Mac laptops sitting on a shelf because the batteries gave up multiple times are laughing at you.

I spent on them a fortune in total, and they broke, pathetically.

I tried, believe me.

Mac HW quality is just another myth.

Why can’t a luxury product range have entry level models? Even Ferrari has cars ranging in price from $220k up to $1m. Search for “Ferrari entry-level” and you’ll get plenty of hits using that phrase for various Portofino, Spider and Roma configurations.

That's not what they say: they say it's cheap.

Luxury is never cheap.

An M1 can't be both entry level and better than high end models at the same price tag, at the same time (that's what they say).

They are not in fact.

Please leave Ferrari alone, they actually make cars that last for decades.

Apple doesn't.

I can’t make this comment without seeming condescending, but please understand me when I say that I don’t intend it that way.

You’re having an emotional reaction to a brand and a product, and this is not ideal.

I struggle to deal with people who are emotional about brands, both love and hate because I find that there’s no room for objectivity or discussion. There are circumstances where interacting with a brand can be wholly toxic (Oracle) or largely good (Linux, if you can call it a brand). But when you only respond in an emotional way it prevents an intellectually curious discussion.

Stop thinking of these as “Apple” computers and instead look at them as.. computers.

It makes the trade offs a lot more obvious when you remove the emotive element.

I’d love to see a reference where Apple or anyone else says their products are cheap. It might be possible to argue they are good value for various reasons such as long product lifetimes, but that’s not the same thing as cheap.

> An M1 can't be both entry level and better than high end models at the same price tag, at the same time (that's what they say).

I have no idea what you’re referring to. Apple has some laptop models that are less expensive, I might even say cheaper, than others. That’s just comparing them relative to other Apple products though. The MacBook Air is cheaper than a MacBook Pro, that’s not the same thing as saying it’s objectively cheap relative to laptops generally. These are the entry level products in the MacBook product range.

You can get capabilities from even the low end M1 MacBooks that you can’t get from even very expensive notebooks from other manufacturers. You can get faster notebooks elsewhere, or lighter notebooks, or… actually no, you can’t get notebooks with better battery life anywhere else. However you can’t get the combination of lightness power and battery duration of even a low end M1 MacBook anywhere else at any price. That can absolutely make it better than more expensive models from other manufacturers in ways some people find very important.

> An M1 can't be both entry level and better than high end models at the same price tag, at the same time

Yes. Yes they can. Because that's their new entry model in the new line-up. And can be both entry level and better than high-end models from the previous line-up.

These are entry models for Apple products. So no sense comparing them with entry models for other products (which could be shoddy plastic netbooks for all those brands care)

There is a middle path here...