At this price it's more expensive than 80% of best-selling laptops, so not quite budget. If you compare in price to Dell for example, they only compete with their XPS line, which is their high-end one.
Apple only does high-end products, which is fine but doesn't make that model cheap.
I know this gets repeated often, but this is simply not true. Apple _does_ make high-end products, and they market themselves as a high-end brand, but Apple has always filled as many market segments as they can. There are plenty examples that prove this statement wrong: iPod Shuffle, iPhone SE, the $250 iPad. They never do deep discounts on their products though, so when they age or go stale they are far overpriced; and they do _not_ make value or budget models.
To look at these CPUs a different way, it’s fairly competitive with Ryzen processors that cost $600-700 alone, except that will buy the whole Mac Mini.
At this price it's more expensive than 80% of best-selling laptops, so not quite budget. If you compare in price to Dell for example, they only compete with their XPS line, which is their high-end one.
Apple only does high-end products, which is fine but doesn't make that model cheap.