Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In real dollars, the cost of Macs are extremely low. $1 in 2000 is about $1.40 now. So the cost of a $1000 13" Mac Air which is a very respectable laptop is about $700 in 2000 dollars. This comparison makes no sense to me. It's 2016, not 2000, so the fact that a Mac Air is $700 in 2000 dollars is a completely random and arbitrary number.
You couldn't buy any laptop of any quality for $700 in 2000. Macs have the reputation of being overpriced, but they are much more affordable than computers at the turn of the century. Of course, PCs are still available for less, but the point is that many people previously unable to afford a Mac can.
To me, the way to weigh value is relative to workload. Few users are hardware bound and today the most likely bottleneck for ordinary people is going to be GPU, not that I'm saying ordinary users are going to run up against it.