Joe Wilcox is at it again – asking the right questions at Apple Watch. Joe has done the research on what anyone who has been shopping for a PC desktop or notebook will likely have noticed – Apple is charging double the price for its platform and usually with less than half the features. As Joe cites- “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 can verify this on the the desktop side where an HP Pavillion with 8GB of memory, quad core processor and 1terabyte of disk space is 3 time the features of an Apple MacProMac selling at nearly double the price.
What the hell is Apple doing ?
According to Steve Jobs he switched Apple to Intel processors to get the cheapest chips, motherboards and other core PC hardware that would allow Apple to compete with Windows PCs head on. Instead Apple has drifted into being not double but now effectively quadruple the price of the equivalent Windows PC. I know that MacOS is good … but not that good.
And here is Microsoft giving Apple a Silver Platter opportunity. And the marketing honchos at Apple at least get that with their devestatingly funny ads about MacOS versus Vista. Right on – Vista is such a bloated pig with response time so variable and operations requiring a reboot or whatever.
And this is not the only opportunity Redmond has sent Cupertinos way. The Microsoft Marketing dopes first said Wow about Vista and then proclaimed that Vista, Office 2007, IE and the coterie of other Microsoft apps and software (including development tools) were People Ready. Yeah…. BZZZZZZZZZZZZT!!!! OOOGAH OOOOGAH OOOGAH DIVE DIVE DIVE AWAY FROM ANOTHER RANDIOSELY FALSE PREMISE AND PROMISE. In fact Ballmer and company could be justly sued by stockholders and employee option holders for concertedly ruining the Microsoft brand and delivering 8 long years of sideways movement of the stock price.
So given this silver platter what is Apple doing ??? I think the word is ….. squandering….