Yes, but having all three of those things (well, specs/performance is probably just one thing, but treating them as separate as you did means that I don't have to do the heavy lifting of figuring out what a third thing would actually be) IS, in fact, a luxury.

Nobody is away from a power source for longer than 18 hours. MOST people don't need the performance that a macbook air has, their NEEDS would be met by a raspberry pi... that is, basic finances, logging into various services, online banking, things that first world citizens "rely" on.

The definition of luxury is "great comfort and extravagance", and every current Apple product fits that definition. Past Apple definitely had non-luxury products, as recently as the iPhone C (discontinued 10 years ago)... but Apple has eliminated all low-value options from their lineup.

This CPU benchmarks in the same ballpark as the M2 and it runs for $329:

https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-IdeaPad-Ryzen5-5500U-1920x1080...

An 18 hour battery life is a luxury characteristic, not something penny pinchers will typically be selecting on.

What about the rest of the system? The SSD, for example?

Apple likes to overcharge for storage, but the drives are _really_ good.

When you're breaking out SSD speeds you're definitely getting into the "luxury" territory.

As I said in another comment:

The point isn't that the MacBook Air isn't better by some metrics than PC laptops. A Rolls-Royce is "better" by certain metrics than a Toyota, too. What makes a device luxury is if it costs substantially more than competing products that the average person would consider a valid replacement.

There is no user buying a lowest-tier Macbook Air who would be able to tell the difference between the Lenovo SSD and the Macbook SSD.

When I bought my cheesegrater Mac Pro, I wanted 8TB of SSD.

Except Apple wanted $3,000 for 7TB of SSD (considering the base price already included 1TB).

Instead, I bought a 4xM.2 PCI card, and 4 2TB Samsung Pro SSDs.

I paid $1,300 for it, got to keep the 1TB "system" SSD.

And I get faster speeds from it, 6.8GBps versus 5.5GBps off the system drive.

For $2,000 I could have got the PCI 4.0 version and SSDs, and get 26GBps.

Expandability is no longer an option with Apple Silicon.

Not technically true. The Mac Pro 2023 has 6 PCI slots...

... for an eye watering $3,000 over the exact same spec Mac Studio.

I liked my cheesegrater, though I didn't like the heat output.

And I cannot justify that. I sacrificed half the throughput (2800MBps) for $379 and got an external 4 x M.2 TB3 enclosure.

Oh, and a USB 3 hub to replace one I had installed in the cheesegrater to augment the built in ports. $400 give or take.

They're average. A 512GB M3 MBA gets like 3000MBps for read/write. A 1TB Samsung 990 Pro, which costs less than the upgrade from 256GB to 512GB on the Air is over twice as fast. And on base models Apple skimps and speeds are slower.

A very fast CPU these days seems ways more unnecessary/superfluous (and therefore "luxury") than a very long battery life.

What the point of comparison? Isn't 18 hour battery and Genius Bar part of the "luxury"?

Like I say Audi is a luxury car because a Toyota costs less than half as much, and you ask "what about a Toyota with leather seats"?

I am all in on Apple, to be clear. Mac Pros, multiple MBPs, Studio, Pro Display XDR, multiple Watches, phones, iPad Pro.

My experiences (multiple) with Genius Bar have been decidedly more "meh" to outright frustrating, versus "luxury", oftentimes where I know more than the Genius.

Logic Board issues where on a brand new macOS install I could reproducibly cause a kernel panic around graphics hardware. There was an open recall (finally, after waiting MONTHS) on this. It covered my Mac. But because it passed their diagnostic tool, they would only offer to replace the board on a time and materials basis.

I had a screen delamination issue. "It's not that bad - you can't see it when the screen is on, and you have to look for it". Huh. Great "luxury" experience.

And then the multiple "we are going to price this so outrageously, and use that as an excuse to try to upsell". Like the MBA that wouldn't charge due to a circuit issue. Battery fine, healthy. Laptop, fine, healthy, on AC. Just couldn't deliver current to the battery. Me, thinking sure, $300ish maybe with a little effort.

"That's going to be $899 to repair. That's only $100 less than a new MBA, maybe we should take a look at some of the new models?" Uh, no. I'm not paying $900 for a laptop that spends 99% (well, 100% now) of its life on AC power.

Good question, I think the answer is even at thousands a window device battery can't hit 18 hour specs. Can someone name a windows device even at 2k+ that acts like an M chip? In fact the pricier windows usually mean GPU and those have worse battery then cheap windows(my 4090 is an hour or so off charge)

Thinkpad X250, admittedly at max specs, did 21 hours in 2018. My T470 from 2020 did over 27 hours at max charge.

M-series Macs is when MacBooks stopped sucking at battery life without sleeping and wrecking state every moment they could.