You get a budget gaming machine for 1k these days, if that. The GPU almost steals your 1k budget by itself. Apple's new top end Mac Mini goes for $1300 and has a 10 core M2 Pro with a 16 core GPU, 16GB memory, and a 512GB SSD. More than enough to play Counter Strike 2 if Valve decided to support the platform. It's not comparable but not as outrageous as people say.
But again, you're still thinking in terms of money here. Where the problem isn't with how much the computer costs. It's completely irrelevant, actually. The problem for Mac users is that the software providers in question in this discussion don't want to support MacOS, which is a decision totally on them. I have no strong opinions against their decision to not support them if the user base just isn't there. There's no doubt that there are tons of MacOS users, they just might not be users that intend to game on those computers the majority of the time. But I do feel empathy for Mac gamers, as that was historically the opinion of game studios refusing to support Linux machines. And to be honest, it's still the case that Linux users are second class citizens when it comes to games that require an anticheat to run (many online FPS games fall into this category.) None of the big anticheat providers want to port their software to run on Linux.
You can play almost any game on ancient GeForce 1080 (i do) with decent fps, except Starfield and maybe some other poorly optimized titles. On windows, that is.
You can also play almost anything on SteamDeck (15W TDP max) on linux ($400 before discounts).
You can't really play 3/4 of game catalog on MacBook Pro M1Pro or newer ($2000+)
But again, you're still thinking in terms of money here. Where the problem isn't with how much the computer costs. It's completely irrelevant, actually. The problem for Mac users is that the software providers in question in this discussion don't want to support MacOS, which is a decision totally on them. I have no strong opinions against their decision to not support them if the user base just isn't there. There's no doubt that there are tons of MacOS users, they just might not be users that intend to game on those computers the majority of the time. But I do feel empathy for Mac gamers, as that was historically the opinion of game studios refusing to support Linux machines. And to be honest, it's still the case that Linux users are second class citizens when it comes to games that require an anticheat to run (many online FPS games fall into this category.) None of the big anticheat providers want to port their software to run on Linux.