On Saturday, Aug. 2, I got to wondering about Mac versus Windows PC pricing after seeing two HP notebooks on sale at the local Target. One of them, a 14-inch model, the HP DV2946NR, sold for $699.99 and packed 4GB of memory and a 320GB hard drive. Capacity for both features is twice that of the $1,299 MacBook—and shared graphics is 356MB compared with a meager 144MB for the MacBook.....

Today I contacted Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis, about computer average selling prices at retail. That HP notebook is right on mark: ASP for retail Windows notebooks is $700. Mac laptops: $1,515. Yeah, right, they're more than twice as much. But there's more: The ASP for Mac desktops is more than $1,000 greater than for Windows PCs, and Mac desktop ASPs were higher in June than they were two years ago.

There are lots of ways to look at the pricing differences:
Apple chooses to sell its computers at premium prices, meaning above $1,000. The lowest-priced Mac notebook starts at $1,099 (MacBook) and the lowest-priced desktop (iMac) for $1,199; granted the Mac Mini starts at $599, but its sales volume is negligible.

In the past, I have defended Apple's pricing, because when comparing Macs and Windows PCs of similar price the hardware features were about the same. That situation has dramatically changed in the last six months, particularly the last three months. I should have paid more attention than I did to this growing disparity, which is separate from but related to average selling prices.

The Apple Mac Cost Misconception : Macs and Their Prices

Let's get straight to the point. Tom's Hardware isn't about being a "PC fanboy." It's about finding the best hardware, revealing up and coming tech and debunking predetermined notions. That begs the question, especially here: what's so special about a Mac anyway?

Here's the short answer: nothing really, just some very elegant aluminum chassis designs. The key, is the operating system. Even still, let's settle this issue about price.

In a recent comment, someone came up with an analogy that a Mac isn't really a BMW, but rather a Hyundai dressed up in a nice exterior. One problem: Hyundai's don't have nice European car exteriors. And to generalize it this way shows the lack of willing to understand the core of the Mac: its operating system. Because that's really what it's about....

...you can always buy a cheaper car to get you from A to B. Instead, let's see what you can get for $2000, from Apple and from others. For $2000, do you really get much less?

Let's take a quick look at some of Apple's competition and their pricing structure compared to Apple's...

The average price of a Mac laptop has fallen just 3 percent over the last two years, compared to a 20 percent decline in Windows laptop pricing.

Speculation that Apple might be slashing Mac prices in the coming weeks could get a boost from new data released by The NPD Group.

Joe Wilcox at Apple Watch put together a chart of data from NPD showing the average selling prices of Windows PCs and Macs at retail stores in the U.S. As of June, the average Mac desktop retails for $1,543 while the average Mac notebook costs $1,515. On the Windows side, the average desktop costs $550 while the notebook costs $700.

In the past, Apple's mainstream desktop model, the iMac, has been denigrated by the PC community as more expensive than models from companies such as Dell with comparable specs. However, none of these comparisons were really fair, as only Apple offered a model that combined the LCD panel with the computer, a design that Apple has used since the inception of the iMac G5.

Now one of the top desktop vendors worldwide, Dell, offers an all-in-one similar in design and specifications to the iMac. After analyzing the product selection, I have reached an interesting conclusion: Apple offers more value and a more diverse line up than Dell if you compare (no pun intended) apples to apples.
Dude, You're Overpaying for a Dell!

Dell's all-in-one desktop is known as the XPS One. The base model costs $1,299, $100 more than the base iMac, and it lacks in several areas. For instance, Dell, oddly enough, has chosen not to reveal the speed of the processors in this line up. Some people might be fine with this lack of information, but many users are not willing to play Russian roulette with their hardware specs.

Fanboys, get your commenting fingers warmed up. A new study shows that, on average, the cost of a Windows PC is half that of an Apple computer. According to data collected by the NPD group, the average Windows notebook goes for $700, while the average Apple laptop costs above $1,500, dropping a mere $59 in the last two years. And that's nothing compared to desktop computers.

The average Mac desktop sells for about $1,000 more than the average PC desktop, which sells for a mere $550.

"But wait," you say, "that's because people interested in higher-end machines buy Apple, while cheap idiots buy PCs." Eh, maybe. But that doesn't explain away the discrepancies.

In the first half of this year, buyers snapped up Macs in record numbers, driving unit volume growth to 40% and delivering record quarterly results for Apple - that's old news.

Interestingly, even as the mothership stacked on large market share gains and banked heavy profits, the gap between Mac and PC average selling prices (ASPs) widened appreciably over the last six months, according to NPD data quoted by eWeek.

To this data, eWeek's Joe Wilcox adds information / analysis he gleaned from talking with NPD's Stephen Baker:

• Windows computer ASPs have reached a plateau from which manufacturers are building bulkier systems.

• If Apple is going to continue its market share gains, or simply maintain that 8.5 percent US share, prices must go down and configurations bulk up.

"On Saturday, Aug. 2, I got to wondering about Mac versus Windows PC pricing after seeing two HP notebooks on sale at the local Target. One of them, a 14-inch model, the HP DV2946NR, sold for $699.99 and packed 4GB of memory and a 320GB hard drive. Capacity for both features is twice that of the $1,299 MacBook—and shared graphics is 356MB compared with a meager 144MB for the MacBook."

I'm not surprised by this, because Apple's pricing is always cyclical. It introduces a new, upgraded model which evens things out, usually to the point where people are paying a premium of 10% or so over equivalently-specced Windows machines.

However, it then maintains those specs until the next product rev, rather than continually incrementally upgrading them, as, say, Dell does. That means that over the lifetime of a product, the price differential increases until the point where Apple's machines are really overpriced for what you get - which is where we are now.

According to Joe Wilcox, a Mac notebook will cost you about twice as much as a similar offering running Windows. So what?...

The going price for a Mac notebook is now over twice that of a typical Windows model, according to data collected by The NPD Group. While the average selling price of a Windows notebook has dropped from $877 in June 2006 to $700 today, the average cost of an Apple system has remained consistently above $1,500 and has only dropped $59 in the past two years. Differences in desktop pricing are more extreme still and have Macs selling for approximately $1,000 more than a common Windows desktop, which sells for about $550.

"I'm a Mac. And I'm a PC." I've heard these phrases countless times on TV and the Web. Heck, the ad is even running on the PC Mag Web site right now.

This brilliant ad campaign from Apple, which manages to make PC users look like uptight boobs, is entertaining and impressively effective. It also helps foster one of the greatest misconceptions of our still relatively young digital age: that Windows-based computers are PCs while Macs are, well, something else. Of course, that's wrong—dead wrong.

If the ad were accurate, John Hodgman (the actor who plays the "PC") would say, "I'm a PC," and Justin Long (the actor who plays the "Mac") would say, "And I'm a PC, too." Why? Because a Macintosh is a PC!

PC Magazine's Lance Ulanoff says, "Macs are PCs, dammit!" He then goes on to explain that the "PC" at PC Magazine stands for personal computer.

I am not convinced.

You see, I was there when the first IBM PCs reached the local ComputerLand store in 1981. And I know that was not the birth of the personal computer industry, which sprang up with the introduction of the first prebuilt (vs. kits) "home computers" in 1977.....

Although Ulanoff may not want to admit it, between the late 1970s, when PC covered the whole field of personal computing, and now, the definition has changed. IBM helped that along by naming its first personal computer the IBM PC 5150. The whole world just called it the IBM PC, and when the clones came, they were called PCs as well.

In the minds of the public, the PC label came to mean a computer that ran MS-DOS - and then Windows. It meant a computer with x86 architecture. If a computer was built around a Motorola 680x0 CPU, or a PowerPC or SPARC or Alpha processor, it wasn't a PC. If it was built on x86 architecture but not compatible with DOS or Windows, it wasn't a PC. It was something different....

Ulanoff may want to rewrite history (at least for the magazine he oversees) and decry the way the PC label has gone from meaning personal computing to meaning a specific range of computers, but the simple fact is that while the Macintosh is a personal computer, the world knows that it is not a PC.

And every time we see an "I'm a Mac" ad, we just know it.

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