I’ve been running into this conversation repeatedly over the past week, so I figured it was time to do a full entry about it. When I wrote my initial response to the CrunchGear piece, “CrunchGear goes back to (private) school,” I got a comment from someone named Robert who didn’t agree with my calling the macbook “relatively cheap.” He said “All comparisons with the Dell models aside, it’s still one of the more expensive laptops you can buy, feature for feature.” Today I received a comment from Chaz, my resident coder, who’s opinion I hold in high regard. He said:

“A similarly featured Dell laptop can be purchased for ~600-700. You’re paying twice the going rate for the same hardware, so I would hardly call that a bargain. When you’re buying a Mac, you’re buying it because you need their hardware to legally run OS X, not because their hardware is better or more affordable….”

NOTE: He also mentions issues with dual booting and desktop preference, but I didn’t have time to address those in this post. –

So allow me to explain why exactly the Apple Macbook is a bargain. (more…)