> Today, that is no longer the case.

My feeling is the opposite: There used to be an Apple hardware premium that was not (to me) justifiable at the time.

But as the software slowly declines, so does the premium - it feels to me like the M1 macs are priced with almost no premium anymore - there is nothing comparable right now (battery-life-wise, processors-speed-wise), but even with the Intel ones, a similarly specced base hardware is similarly priced (and the mac has much higher build quality than e.g. dell and hp in my experience).

The place where you still pay Apple premium is the upgrades (more memory, more disk). But overall, there's isn't much of a premium paid anymore when buying an Apple.