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.