The cost of being cool....

There is a major discrepancy between the price of Macs and PC's - Joe Wilcox takes up the story (thanks to Ian Betteridge for the link)

"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 wondered: If Vista notebooks are selling for so little and packing so much, how does this compare with Mac desktops and notebooks?

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.

Ian notes its a bit more subtle than that, as:

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.

However, we all know that the reason people buy Macs at a premium is they are supposedly far cooler - buy a Mac, so the logic goes, and you can be Creative. At any rate, the premium for looking the part in Geekland seems to be a c 100% price increase on average (I think from memory that between 1.5:1 and 2:1 is roughly the ratio for most consumer fashion items' premium over the bog standard).

So, from the analysis it allows one to calculate the behavioural economics of geek coolness - at c $1,500 vs say $750 (for laptops), thats about $ 750 extra that a PC laptop user (like me) can spend to get equal or better coolness.

(This is a serious concern of course - I have had social media colleagues even Twitter their anxiety about being seen next to a PC user )

So the question is, what can one buy for $750 that confers equal or better coolness than a Mac PC. Lessee...$750 - thats about £ 375

So, I had a look at what Geek Fashion I could buy for that amount - how about an iPhone 3G for £150 (OK, its another Apple, but you get the point), those impossibly square geek glasses that are de rigeur today for say £70 (gets a Designer Label knockoff), the absolutely perfect set of geek trainers for another c £60, some seriously geeky trousers with a wearable keyboard (say £85) and topped off with a Fail Whale T shirt (£10)

OK, maybe its better just to get the Mac

(Update - Zoli Erdos makes the point that compared to Vista, the Total Cost of Ownership of Mac OS would probably burn the difference in a few days owing to the extra hassle. But of course, if you use XP that doesn't apply - unless you turn it into Vista of course..... )