Well, if you look at the Mac Mini, the price parity breaks down. The features may be slightly less on it as far as wireless and maybe a little processor speed, but a Dell Inspiron 530 esktop can be had for $450 or so that blows away the Mac Mini in terms of hard disk storage (with room for a full 250GB drive) and other such fun. Granted, the Mac Mini is smaller, but thanks to desktop components the Dell eats the mini’s lunch from a price-performance perspective. Oh, and the Dell comes with a keyboard and mouse…what an ingenious thought! And the mouse actually is not a pain to use, as the Apple Mighty Mouse is…I went out and bought a Logitech optical mouse ecause I could not stand to use the Mighty Mouse on my iMac…ech…

Also, if you don’t mind having a regular desktop as opposed to the all-in-one-ness of the iMac, Dell can offer you for $1300 basically everything the $1500 iMac gets you. Except the webcam and slightly better graphics.

When it comes to the Mac Pro vs. Dell’s hot-rod XPS system, granted the Mac Pro is aimed at a bit different audience, but the ell config versus the Mac Pro leaves me calling “skunk rule” With a faster, single-die quad core proc, faster memory…well yu get my drift…at nearly $1000 less than the Apple model…well, you decide. And if you need more speed, Dell’s overclocked 3.33GHz upgrade is precisely $52 more than an upgrade to a mere 3 GHz on the Apple platform. Sure, you can run octo-core on the Mac Pro, but that’ll run you another $700 and the performance increase ain’t gonna help ya until years down the road. Same on the eight memory slots…whacha gonna do with ‘em?

And if you really need all that, looks like Dell’s Precision workstations come out to a few hundred chraper than the Mac Pro. Sorta like a “back atcha” for the macbooks…

…interstingly, the Dell 17″ workstation comes out to $200 more than the Macbook Pro similarly configured, but then again the workstation is probably better-built (!) and sports a workstation-class graphis card. If you want a gaming machine, Dell’s XPS laptops will deliver the goods, albeit thick-ly.

Just comparing things between Apple and Dell, and on some things Apple is unnervingly similar (Dell please clean up thy act) but again in may cases Dell pulls a “skunk rule” on Apple with performance to price…

Please read the whole post before pointing out discrepancies in my comparison. I will ost them myself.

So anyway I decided to peruse the Dell website today, and found to my surprise that the XPS M1330 laptop they had started at $1099 price-wise. Same as the Apple Macbook…so I decided to do a price comparison.

Well, first I found out that I couldn’t get the lowest-end options on feature parity with each other. So I upped to the Apple 2.2GHz white model of the Macbook, which was $1299…and found to my horror that a similarly configured Dell M1330 cost $50 more than the Macbook! I’m talking same graphics, same processor, same memory, same hard disk, same DVD burner, same (non-Intel) draft-N wireless card (well, Dell is Dell branded, Macbook is Atheros), same 6-cell battery (okay, 56 WHr for Dell, 55 for Apple)…and the Dell is $1349!  What the heck?!?

Now in fairness, the Dell laptop is MUCH more configurable than the Macbook, the Dell has more ports, the Dell has an ExpressCard slot, a better webcam and Vista Home Premium, but then again the Macbook is thinner overall than the Dell and with iLife ’08 and OS X Leopard you might as well have Vista Home Premium on the Macbook, and maybe then some depending on who you’re talking to. !?!

But on further inspection, the Dell comes with some extra goodies: one year of LoJack laptop protection and 15 months of Trend Micro Internet Security. You also get 10 GB of online backup storeage for a year with the Dell unit. Discounting antivirus since you don’t need that on Mac quite yet and because you can get it for free on PC relatively easily, you have $50 worth of value from the LoJack…the price difference between the two laptops. The 10GB of storage is what Apple provides with their $100-a-year (or $70 if you buy it with a Mac last time I looked closely…may have changed)  .Mac service. Make of that what you will.

So technically EXACTLY the same configuration on a Mac would be the same or more than the Dell, but the Dell makes you take LoJack which I personally have no use for…neither of my laptops have walked off and I’ve had my Dell for over a year now…interesting, no? Also, there’s an audience difference here: the Dell is relatively a higher-end machine than the Apple, hence expansion capabilities, likely similar or even better build quality, etc…but it’s still a bit on an eye-opener to see that Apple is this close to price parity with similarly-equipped PCs. Now let me see if this happens with any other PC system…scary huh?