There is a reason Apple charges those prices. Components like 16GB dual channel DDR4 SO-DIMMs, Nvidia 1070GTX w/ 8GB RAM, 4K HiDPI/retina displays, and NVMe SS

There is a reason Apple charges those prices. Components like 16GB dual channel DDR4 SO-DIMMs, Nvidia 1070GTX w/ 8GB RAM, 4K HiDPI/retina displays, and NVMe SSDs that can do 3500MB/sec. are not cheap. Here's an interesting exercise: Go to Newegg or Amazon and fill your shopping cart with all of the components you want in your system, then compare the price of all the components separately with the system price you get for a well engineered system that runs Linux flawlessly. If you are looking for 32GB of RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD in a laptop, you are by definition an early adopter, and should expect to pay an early adopter penalty. If you want the sub-$500 notebook you're going to get the technology that early adopters were buying a few years ago.