Just an example of modern Marketing storytelling in action: Microsoft has a current spot out showing a young, insecure woman who pretends to be an independent thinker, trying to get a 17" laptop for under 1000 $. After not finding a Mac for that price, she buys a PC Laptop for 800$. End of spot. If you go online and check the specs of that model, you'll quickly find the 1000 $ worth of parts she thought she got but is actually missing. The funniest being the 17" monitor that only displays the amount of a 15 inch monitor (old hardware, lower resolution) There go about 400$ she thought she saved but actually overspent for nothing, just with that. You have to admire the cleverness of the character building and the storytelling in that and all the other spots that makes customers defend the Mac/PC cost myth with such conviction against all facts.
But even if you live with the low quality and direct your eye to the saved money for condolence, if you work as a freelancer and take 30$/hour, estimating standard PC maintenance, you'll use up the "saved" 1000$ in 32 hours or about 2h/week=4 months. So after only 4 months, you spent exactly as much as for a Mac, only that there is a computer on your desk with old technology that additionally already lost half of its market value.
So,based on hard facts, and the shared reality that 1+1 equals 2, Macs are, financially the overall better buy. That makes every "expensive Mac" story really deal with something of greater importance than money. A pattern, a theme. Some underlying emotional something. A strange occurrence of repeating bad luck. A proof of expensive Macs it is not. But maybe the beginning of an interesting story.