Exactly this, I was fine with the Mac Pro until 2012, it was a little more expensive than PCs but not much outrageously so (maybe 30% more, that's a tax I was fine paying given the OS and that it was quite a well built machine).
The new Mac Pro is 3-4x the price of a machine built around AMD having equivalent performances. I'm building a Threadripper for exactly this reason. Most of the issue is Intel vs AMD and the fact that AMD's Threadrippers are an amazing deal when it comes to performance per dollar and that Apple has an aversion to offering decent GPUs
The M1 was released on the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini.
Buying an iMac now would seem to be a poor decision.
From what I'm seeing in some of the comments, people are so lost in the history of the past years of Apple being the pooch ridden from behind on performance, that they can't get their heads out of their arses to see how awesome this is.
I am sitting here right now wondering if I should invest more of my savings directly in Apple stock, at least temporarily to ride their sales wave, or if I should buy a Mac mini and a nice wide curved monitor with a mechanical keyboard from WASD and be f'ing awesome all of a sudden.
The only reason I'm not hitting the buy button is that all of that isn't $135. There's no reason for that amount, but if it said $135, I'd have already paid for it and been drinking beer to celebrate the happiest purchases I ever made.
The new Mini is certainly impressive and suitable for many tasks, but not a replacement for a full desktop machine. Memory and storage are very limited, and the GPU, while great for the MacBook Air, is far from desktop performance. Also, for desktop, the ports selection is very limited.
The iMac in many senses isn't a replacement for a proper desktop. You can't expand the disk storage, many iterations had no great graphics cards, this seems to be somewhat better now, but an upgrade means having to upgrade everything, including the screen. You can't even clean out the fans after some years.
Yes, I own an iMac, as this is the closest to a desktop machine Apple sells, but a replacement for what the Mac Pro used to be, it is not.
The new Mac Pro is 3-4x the price of a machine built around AMD having equivalent performances. I'm building a Threadripper for exactly this reason. Most of the issue is Intel vs AMD and the fact that AMD's Threadrippers are an amazing deal when it comes to performance per dollar and that Apple has an aversion to offering decent GPUs