I still find it hard to believe that such a device can be less that $1000, considering how many parts have to be designed, how many cutting edge components there are in there, the depth of the supply chain and the manufacturing quality. Modern manufacturing is insane.
Probably the most complex single device humans can make is a CPU die and you can have a mid-range one for the price of a meal, and this consumer laptop presumably has manufacturing tolerances that would make the people who built spacecraft a few decades ago sweat.
> you can have a mid-range one for the price of a meal
Is that an expensive meal or a cheap CPU? A meal for a family?
My mental model for a mid-range CPU is an i3 (don't forget Pentium / Celeron), and even for those Intel recommends charging $109-119 for the i3-13100F (they had a similar range for the i3-10105F). Even if you go all the way back to the first generation of Intel Core cpus, the i3-530 had a recommended price of $117.
Even if you're buying used + several generations old off eBay, you're still probably paying at least $50. And, note that once you're looking at several generations old hardware, you're really not looking at a mid-range device anymore -- The i3-13100F scores nearly twice as high on PassMark as the i3-10100F, for instance, and higher than the i7-9700F.
It's still orders of magnitude cheaper and more powerful than anything from the 80s, certainly, but new hardware is not _that_ cheap.
Also, that said, I remember when the Macbook Air first launched -- I know some people who ran the numbers and were impressed they could fit that SSD + RAM + CPU + display + battery in that price envelope.
I don't know how things in Deep America are, but since Herr Putin started his little anschluss, a meal for two in a nice European restaurant can easily run in the 3-digits. And I'm talking nice, not Michelin-nice - for those you'll need 3 digits for each person.
Probably the most complex single device humans can make is a CPU die and you can have a mid-range one for the price of a meal, and this consumer laptop presumably has manufacturing tolerances that would make the people who built spacecraft a few decades ago sweat.