The pricing issue is complicated because you can't consider the price of the Apple CPU on its own. However, you can get a Mac with 16 GiB of RAM, 256 GiB of SSD

The pricing issue is complicated because you can't consider the price of the Apple CPU on its own. However, you can get a Mac with 16 GiB of RAM, 256 GiB of SSD storage, and 10 cores of Apple M4 for $600. Even if you use the least charitable benchmarks for the M4, that is going to put it way above a similarly-priced PC. Of course, once you start upgrading the RAM and SSD, the prices will lift into the sky.