The Apple Premium - Is It Too Much?

The old axiom that “you get what you pay for” is often true. But we all know that a careful buyer can often pay for more than what he gets, so the wise thing to do is always to gather all the information you can about an item before you commit to purchasing it. That said, I’ve always been willing to pay a bit more for the “Apple Premium”, i.e., the style, integration, and feature sets that Apple systems present to a buyer. But I have to tell you that I’ve been struggling for some time with the price of the MacBook Pro. As much as I like the machine, I am not totally convinced it’s worth the money Apple is asking for it.

When PC World first published some reviews of dual-core powered notebooks, the prices for those notebooks fell into the same range that Apple was using for its MacBook Pro models, so I felt it was inline with the market. I told my stepson Tim that in a recent conversation, and that became the impetus for me to look at the issue again. I was surprised to find a Dell dual-core Intel powered notebook for under $1000; and while it did not have quite the feature set the MacBook Pro does, for what I need a notebook for, it was close enough. That has me questioning once again the price premium Apple is demanding for the MacBook Pro, especially when there are no major applications to run on it.

Frankly, the only way I can justify paying $2000 or more for a notebook is if it replaces both my current PowerBook and my current iMac. Once native applications are released, the MacBook Pro could do just that as long as it had at least a 100GB hard drive and 1 GB of RAM. I’m still thinking about whether that’s the course I want to take or whether I want to use my notebook as “portable use only”. I’m also waiting to see if any new PowerBook models surface (like a 12 inch model) and what iBook models show up. I suspect the latter will house single-core CPU’s; if so, I would only buy one if performance benchmarks were showing they were faster than single-core G4’s. Moreover, I’m still really struggling with the idea of outlaying the money it will take to transition our Macs to Intel, both from a hardware and software standpoint, so soon after spending a fortune getting us onto Mac OS X and the G5. It’s really kind of a bitter pill to swallow, even if it means that Macs and us will be better off in the long run.