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?
