Well the Apple m1 machines are fast and have incredibly low power consumption so maybe they’re trying to make their i3 compete with that?
Going to be interesting though, the higher tier Apple silicon machines will probably be shipping before any of these i3 chips so intel will likely be playing catch-up for years at least.
Eh, the cheapest M1 Mac is the Mac Mini at $699, $100 less than the outgoing model and offering better perfromance at some tasks than the iMac Pro. Keep in mind that there is the whole 'profit margin' factor. At $699, the mac mini offers much better perfromance than the outgoing model while costing $100 less. Why chop even more money off it?
Apple's cost in manufacturing has always been rooted in quality components and Software Engineering. They just don't build low end models and likely never will. The fact that you can buy a $300 iPad is actually kinda weird for Apple.
They are probably binning a lot of product right now. They'll eventually need to do something with all those chips that didn't make the cut. This is apple we're talking about. There's surely a 5+ year plan to develop this ecosystem fully. I'd be more surprised if we didn't see a complete line of custom chips across all apple products within the decade.
At least in the US market (I don't have experience in other markets), Apple is definitely not the cheaper laptop company. The average laptop sold in 2019 sold for ~$700.[0] The cheapest laptop Apple currently sells is $1,000. Apple only sells high-end luxury laptops. Most laptops sold are cheaper than even the cheapest Mac.
When you compare similarly spec'd machines from other manufacturers then yeah they're usually in the same ballpark numbers. I don't know I'd say Apple is always more expensive or always cheaper when looking at only the high-end price range.
The MacBook Air used to have an i3 in the $999 model which now has an M1. So in that sense the M1 is comparable to an i3. They both serve the same market.
There are also some high-end Windows laptops using i3s like the $999 Dell XPS 13.
Issue is that Intel will have an obvious problem on their hands:
Apple used the i3 in the Air because it was low cost and low power for good battery life. The M1 fits those needs but then blows the perfromance well beyond what we could call an i7 in this segment. (All in the comparable wattage i7 had 30% max less single-core perfromance and 1/3rd the multicore perfromance)
Intel sells chips like this on a sliding scale from i3 to i9.
If Intel made an i3 that compares favorably to the M1, it would be faster and cooler than any other CPU Intel makes, ruining i7 and i9 sales. It would pretty rapidly piss-off their vendors who seek to upsell expensive skus.
I could see a TSMC i3 core in a different name possibly, like Intel Evo Next or something like that and then them selling it as a premium chip for a high profit.
Going to be interesting though, the higher tier Apple silicon machines will probably be shipping before any of these i3 chips so intel will likely be playing catch-up for years at least.