Not even that. The only computer you’ll be able to buy will effectively be an Alexa speaker through which you tell whichever AI service you subscribe to what you want, and it’ll sometimes get it right enough. Nothing will work properly, but soon people will forget that there once was deterministic computing, that you could own a machine that would predictably follow instructions and, if the instructions are correct, get reliable results. To them, computers must have always been a vaguely sucky form of magic, and oldtimers’ tales of mouse menus, command lines and dumb machines that could only do what they were instructed to sound like some kind of Amish horse-and-buggy shit.

The entry level models have been the best value computers for a while

I had a thread ripper pro at work and it get beaten by a 5 year old m1 Mac mini for most use cases

If anything Apple is probably the one that can get away with price increases the most since they have the best laptops on the market. Yeah, yeah, you're stuck with MacOS but other laptops just can't compete with M series chips.

"Comparable" PCs cost the same, how is this any different from them raising prices like they already have?

To what? Everyone is raising their prices now.