notjustjay said:
For the record, I do agree that Apple's hardware prices are a bit steep. There's no question. Whether it's worth the price is another question (and I along with many other people here believe it is). It's true that once you do some comparison shopping and get similarly-specced hardware and add in the costs of the software you get, industrial design, etc. that you're getting a decent deal.
That's absolutely right. For quite some time now, Macs have been very competitive in price with
similarly specced PCs. Yet their prices are still seen as unnecessarily high, and I kind of agree. Why?
Because Apple likes to throw in the kitchen sink, even on the base model. You have to buy a bunch of stuff you may not ever need, just to gain entry into the OS X club. Built-in iSight, remote control, FireWire, DVD burner, backlit keyboard, light sensor, gigabit ethernet, hefty video card, motion sensor, airport, bluetooth, etc. You configure an equivalent PC to add all the things that come standard on the Mac, and you'll pay a lot more than that PC's base price. Problem is, there's no option on the Mac to get just a basic model - cpu, memory, hard drive, basic video, 100-base-T ethernet, etc, that all runs OS X.
Yes, there are different product families, so if you don't need everything in the pro notebook, you get an iBook. But even that has extras people may not want (FireWire is probably the biggest one). But I'm not too worried about the iBook, especially once it goes Intel. There will be cheaper competitors, but it's a damn good value for what you get.
Where I think there is a glaring deficiency in the product lineup is on the desktop. The Mac mini was supposed to be the cheap sub-$500 Mac to shut up all the price complaints, but it can't even claim that anymore with its $599 base price. It includes several things that many people probably don't want or need in a basic desktop machine: airport, bluetooth, remote, and tiny size. I'm guessing that the size constraint adds quite a bit to the machine's price.
What I'd like to see is a very basic Mac minitower, configured in specs like the Mac mini, but with the above features (airport, bluetooth, remote) as options. How much could Apple squeeze down the price by removing these components, as well as removing the size constraint? To $400 maybe? The mini is cute and stylish and all that, but I think something like this would fly off the shelves based on bang for the buck alone. It probably won't happen because Steve Jobs, and Apple by extension, is too interested in the "cool" factor to sell a basic, no-frills machine that runs OS X well. They're free to do whatever they please as a company, but that's too bad. They could still make it look as good as any other Apple product, and I always thought that OS X was by far the biggest part of the Mac experience anyway.
What's really disappointing is reading all the belligerent responses here advising the original poster to quit whining, don't complain if you don't want to pay up, etc. It comes across to me as rather elitist, arrogant, and childish. This isn't some country club for rich people to sit around and look down their noses at the poor folks who can't or are unwilling to afford the price of membership. That price could be lower, and Apple simply chooses not to make it so. That's their right, but I also think there's nothing wrong with a potential customer venting about that fact. Just like my rant in my sig.
