Ordinary folks are going more and more chromebooks these days, those are the "low cost laptops" that are on the shelves at your local bestbuy/curry's/elgiganten etc;
For everything more than that: the Macbook Air is equivalent or cheaper.
People seem to continue the lie that Apple hardware is more expensive, yet I just closed a deal on a business thinkpad (T14s Gen6) which was double the price and 2/3rds as performant, because we're a Windows shop and we don't buy Apple. Forgive my annoyance here but someone told me that "at least we don't buy expensive Macs" after we signed the invoice and it really got under my skin because it's legitimately half the price for more power. Completely blinded by ignorance.
Upgrades might be expensive, sure, but anything of any quality has always been like-for-like with Apple being cheaper on the low-spec end.
The consumer grade market where Windows used to dominate is having their lunch totally stolen by Chromebooks and Android Tablets. (More-so by Tablets I would argue).