A honda accord starts at $20k. All I want to do is get to my cousins house three blocks down the street. I could buy 20 bicycles for that price or buy 1 and save money.
This doesn't mean the honda is overpriced, correct? Your entire comment is a non sequitur.
I bought my current laptop in late 2011 for $750. Specs are 4 GB (which I cheaply upgraded to 8GB right away), GT 540M (1GB dedicated graphics memory), Core i7 @ 2.2 GHz, USB 3.0.
Moral: If you're looking at the higher end of the performance/price spectrum because you do things like gaming and compiling large programs like the Linux kernel, Macbooks aren't just overpriced, they're underpowered.
Okay, here goes: In 2010 I bought an Eee PC. It has great battery life, a small screen, and less-than-stellar specs. It's very light and portable. It's perfectly fine for email, web browsing, document editing, or even light development work.
That still doesn't make for a fair comparison for what the Air is, but what you'd use it for. The two are not the same.
As far as performance goes, my 2011 11" Macbook Air was my primary development machine for a year (in both Xcode and IntelliJ/Scala). That Air also sported better battery life than any of the Eee PC line. It was more expensive, sure, but $500 is not very much when I'm using the machine for 6+ hours every day of the year. It was also more capable than that Eee PC and ran an operating system I found actually enjoyable to use (versus merely tolerable in the case of Windows or Linux); I have no problem paying $200-$300 more simply because of the feature that is OS X because for me, it's better.
And I haven't even touched on the build quality, which--in rather stark contrast to your attempted handwaving of an Air being "insubstantial" in another comment in this thread--is fantastic and makes me feel happy to use it, makes me enjoy working with it more. (Form is not superfluous. Pleasing form makes interacting with the computer more enjoyable, much like a well-designed tool in my shop or my kitchen.)
Note that a 2.2GHz Sandy Bridge is not the same as a 2.2GHz Haswell. Older Macbooks had substantially higher-clocked processors, because Sandy Bridge was lower IPC.
None of that matters to me enough to make me spend hundreds of dollars more and be content with a laptop that does less.
> hot
Only when you're actually running a game or using all the CPU cores.
> feels cheap
I don't like spending money unnecessarily. I regard my laptop with pride. Not just because it's a practical tool for day-to-day work and play. Not just because the specs give me bragging rights. But also because it's a symbol of how good I am at bargain hunting.
Your MacBook is tiny, insubstantial, and would make me feel like a sucker if I'd shelled out an entire grand for it.
Just because your use of a computer is 'basic' enough to be serviced with bargain spec machines, doesn't make the Apple stuff "overpriced" as you are trying to imply.
To those of you saying Apple h/w is overpriced, find comparable spec'd machines to compare with and you'll find it's not as horrific as you claim. i.e. weight, battery, screen, power
All I want to do is browse the Internet.
I could buy 3 Chromebooks for the price of that Macbook Air. Or 1 Chromebook and save money.