That was also true for older macs, which were cheaper.
I believe that the Apple Silicon macs are the highest-margin macs Apple has ever made, since they no longer have to pay Intel for the CPUs or AMD for the GPUs.
I can see no technical or logistical reason why Apple had to increase prices, and believe it is entirely driven by the idea that the market can bear it.
That doesn't sound right. The m series chips are literally copy pasted from their a series and they operate at a scale where they probably get nice economies of scale. I bet they increased their margins a substancial amount.
I am not convinced. Most of the development cost for Apple Silicon is already covered by the iphone and ipad. They always had to pay for manufacturing and logistics so that's not a new thing, and I bet they paid AMD and Intel way more than they pay TSMC even now.