I’m a longtime PC user who is now on a Macbook Pro. I’ve been price conscious in the past, to the point where I usually built my own desktops.
Here are some of the things I think justify the $2000 price of my laptop:

First and foremost: OSX, I would gladly pay an extra $300 for being able to sleep my machine by closing the lid, and wake it with no problems, ever. My uptime on the laptop averages around a month between shutdowns. My time from lid-open to working is an average of 3-5 seconds. On my acer windows laptop, I’m lucky if the thing wakes up at all.
I won’t even get into all the nice-to-have apps that come with it.

I’d also gladly spend some extra money for the light sensor, which controls my screen brightness and keyboard illumination automatically. Never having to fiddle with those controls is great.

I’ll spend more for multi-touch, too. I no longer use a mouse at all with this computer unless I am playing a game where the extra buttons on my Logitech Rev MX are useful. I work all day using the touchpad. Going back to my acer feels like stepping back in time, it is so clunky.

Other niceties:
independent volume control depending on whether your headphone are plugged in or not.

multi-monitor support that ‘just works’ whenever I plug in or remove the video cable. No changing display settings.

magsafe power cords that have saved my ass more than once.

And lastly, the display on this thing is better than any other laptop I’ve had. I actually enjoy watching TV on it.

The comparisons made in that article are incorrect.

I don’t own a single Apple product but that article was so lacking in facts or even proper logic that I can’t believe JK even mentioned it.

1. You can’t compare Average Selling Price because everyone knows Apple only sells higher end hardware, they don’t have Celerons or Atoms or even Core 2 Duo below 2Ghz in their lineup.

2. The HP laptop mentioned had 4GB RAM and 320GB HDD – but what about the rest of the specs…something smells fishy…(and he definitely doesn’t understand ‘shared graphics’).

3. iMac vs Inspiron 518 – look at the differences! Graphics, Bluetooth, Wifi, Webcam are the technical ones but what about the better, higher resolution, screen. What about the amount of space it takes up on your desk, or the amount of electricity. That’s not even counting the looks. People who buy an iMac buy it for the all-in-one feature, surely that’s apparent! So compare it with HP or Dell’s iMac clones.

Another difference in desktop prices – the Mac Pro is more like a Dell server than a desktop. So again, price comparisons would be like comparing apples to oranges.

OK, I’ve had enough of this totally false propaganda.

Firstly, the original story relates to ASP (average selling price) not comparing products like for like. Apple don’t sell many cheap PCs so right from the first paragraph this is an irrelevant comparison

Secondly, I went to the Dell website and built an Inspiron 518 with the same specs as a baseline iMac being careful not to forget the good monitor with the webcam, the ATI graphics and the 802.11n networking. Admittedly I gave is 2GB of RAM but Vista eats most of that. The result $1,019 vs the baseline iMac’s $1,199 !! Even the photos above show the Dell equivalent of the iMac the XPSOne which is $100 more!

Thirdly, although Wintel sale tactics imply otherwise, hardware is only half of the equation and the lesser important half as it’s the software design quality which dictates usefulness. Windows was, is and always will be a poor copy of MacOS, having used both extensively there is no comparison – the Mac wins and is definitely worth the 10% premium

Keep trying

McD

AlfieJr,

I guess I shouldn’t have said I’ve never used them, because I have.

The point is I don’t use them regularly enough for them to matter. I can appreciate that these apps make a difference to some people. However, to me, these apps just waste hard drive space.

And, whether you like it or not, you over paid for those apps, and you had no choice about whether they’re on there or not.

One man’s crapware is another man’s treasure.

Quite astonishing figures..but as stated above user experience also matters.

My sister in law is still regretting not to have spent that more money after one week using an HP laptop with VISTA… She envies our Macbooks every day (mine and my wife’s). You pay more but you get MUCH more.

“macs have some too: a demo of MS Office.”

Ooooooh, how clever. They must love you down at the Apple store.

sorry nate, but the Vista apps package just doesn’t match the iLife suite. if you have used them both, you’d know. you have to buy an Adobe suite or something like it for Windows to match iLife. but then as you said, you haven’t used them. so you don’t know what you’re talking about. and neither is crapware by any definition of the term. “crapware” is the third-party demo and teaser “light” software most PC makers preload for a fee paid by those third parties. it’s not about your opinion, it’s a category in software marketing techniques.

macs have some too: a demo of MS Office.

penguin for the win ;)

*Blarg. Change that second “MacBooks” in the second paragraph to “iBooks”.