I’m confused because your post has almost nothing to do with the OP and Apple really never had a hardware advantage in the laptop industry as with their desktop and server offerings. As for labtops, they were never the fastest processors GPUs or RAM, never had the biggest fastest storage, always had huge compromises and we’re always expensive. Apple’s true advantage was the willingness to upset a plurality of its users by removing all but the most “necessary” parallels, slick tight design, high quality materials, and of course a simple non-MS, non-Linux OS. All of these are still Apple specific today. An added bonus, Apple always had the highest resale and they still do.