If you wanted this, you don’t need a dam apple laptop, but at the same time, the closest competitor is the new snapdragon laptops that are closer to having up to a week of battery life. Also, they are capable of running more than you can on an apple machine, albeit it is early progress in proper x86 emulation, and more productivity programs are starting to support it.

So, no, you are NOT forced to make a decision to get a MacBook and the price gouging you experience.

Even then, picking a device for your use case is extremely important. I know many people who can survive with lower powered devices as they only use it for web browsing or documents like Excel or Word. Which an apple device would work well for but seriously is complete overkill and overpriced for.