Cheaper Macs? Yes, please!
Could Apple be considering cutting their admittedly somewhat higher prices? That would seem to be what this article on Ars Technica is hinting at.
I, for one, would welcome a price drop for Macintosh computers. They’re my preferred platform on which to work, and when it finally comes time to replace my ailing home computer, the good reader can rest assured that I’ll be looking at a MacBook to replace it with.
And paying a couple hundred bucks less for one of those wouldn’t bother me, no sir. “Twist my rubber arm,” and all that.
But here’s the thing: I don’t find Macs to be all that over-priced; in fact, I don’t find them to be over-priced at all. Yes, one can get a Windows “PC” for cheaper, in theory…but only if one is willing to sacrifice build quality or features & performance (or, possibly, both).
I play a game sometimes, when I need to “take five” and clear my head. I go to some PC manufacturer’s website, or to the Memory Express website, and look at the prices for various notebook configurations (my interest in desktops has waned to the point on nonexistence). And I either configure or look for a laptop that matches or exceeds the specs of the base-model MacBook on the following metrics: processor speed, RAM, hard drive space, and graphics processing.
It’s that last point that is usually the killer; whereas all the Mac models now ship with, at minimum, the nVidia 9400m chipset, many low- and mid-range PC notebooks still rely on underpowered Intel GPUs.
I’m also picky in that I don’t want a large laptop; my current one has a 12″ screen, and my ideal notebook wouldn’t have a screen larger than 13″. I’d be willing to settle for a 15″ laptop iff (that’s shorthand for “if and only if”) it met all my spec requirements and was available at a substantial deal. If I have to settle for lugging around the extra poundage, I want at least a bit of financial compensation for my trouble.
And here’s the rub: PC laptops which meet my (admittedly high) standard tend to be as expensive, if not more expensive, than the Mac against which I’m comparing them! Not always, but usually.
And when the PC does actually manage to come in at a lower price point, that advantage almost always evaporates once I factor in the cost of “downgrading” (it should really be called “upgrading”) the OS from Windows Vista to Windows XP.
Because I refuse to use Vista. I’ll gladly use XP; if I couldn’t, I’d slipstream OS X onto the laptop…in which case, I might as well have just bought the Mac in the first place!
But I digress.
I guess what I’m getting at is that while I get that some recent marketing, especially in regard to notebooks, has done wonders to renew the not-necessarily-true image of the over-priced Mac, I think the success of such marketing is more a testament to the fickleness of the consumer rather than to the unreasonableness of Apple’s price points.
Or: yeah, you can get a laptop for half the price of a MacBook…but what are you going to do with it?
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