[superuser2]

They're "overpriced" because you can buy more GHz, cores, GB ram, and GB storage for drastically less money.

What you can't find is screen resolution, quality of the keyboard, trackpad, and hinge, battery life, and general polish ("marketing") along with the other specs, while still costing less.

[redler]

I agree, but I wouldn't characterize polish as "marketing". Polish includes design cohesion, build quality, choice of materials, a philosophy of engineering in service of the user experience (consider the comment elsewhere in this thread about how Apple has bespoke handling for Thunderbolt to allow it to power down at idle), and software/hardware integration. It's arguable that Apple has slipped in some of these areas, but none of them are "marketing", and all of them contribute to the sense of quality (and to cost).

[superuser2]

I agree, but I think most critics of Apple would claim that only specs are real, and what we're talking about here is an illusion created by branding.