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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed this even with normal laptops at the smaller end. If you're looking for a 15" laptop, you can find a lot cheaper PCs than the $1,799 MacBook Pro. But if you're looking for a 13" laptop with roughly equivalent processing power and weight, it's hard to find a PC laptop much cheaper than the $1,099 MacBook or $1,199 MacBook Pro. Some are considerably more, because while Apple prices the 13" at the bottom of their range, a lot of PC manufacturers price the "ultraportables" as a premium item.

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Having just recently priced laptops, I didn't have this experience. A 13" MBP is $1200 for the bare-bones options (4GB RAM, Core 2 Duo, 250GB 5400 RPM SATA). It weighs about 4.5 lbs. They want an additional $400 for an extra 4GB of RAM (wtf?)

A Dell Inspiron 14" with the same specs clocks in at $665 at 4.9 lbs (which is still under the 5lb "ultraportable" mark). A Lenovo U350 with similar specs clocks in at $700 and 3.5 lbs.

The Apple tax is very definitely still in play.

But if you move up to Dells and Lenovo's "premiere" laptops (Latitudes and Thinkpads), then the price difference narrows considerably. Bare bottom T410 (14") is ~1200 (granted, its currently on sale for like 700-800 dollars... Lenovo has a lot of sales actually).

I think it's fair to say that MBPs compete with all of the other brands "one step up" or business lines. MBP build quality alone lets it fight in that category.

At some point, you're paying a few hundred extra for the aluminum body and glowy Apple logo - it's not just about "premium" versus "consumer" tiers of hardware.

A Latitude 5400 (again, same hardware loadout) prices on Dell's website right now at $849.00. A ThinkPad Edge 13", again, similar loadout, prices at $694.00.

Apple makes fantastic hardware, no doubt, but it's very difficult to consider them to be competitively priced. For the price I'd pay for a MBP, I can get a machine a generation ahead in terms of raw horsepower. I just got an HP Envy 17 (I wanted a portable workstation, rather than a ultralight) and it's a hell of a lot of hardware (Core i7, 8GB RAM, 750GB 7200 RPM HDD) for roughly half the price of an equivalent MBP.

I think the body is actually a pretty big deal. Who else is making unibodies like that?

Dell was selling one for a little bit: http://www.dell.com/us/p/adamo-laptops

Apple really does have the materials/build quality thing down. I don't know anyone who makes a physically better laptop or phone...

Let me tell you a story about my 17" unibody MacBook Pro. It's nearly 2 years old now. I used this thing constantly, I use it about 12 hours a day, every day, and carry it around in my backpack every single day. Most weekends, too, even.

Thanks to the glass screen, the screen as as good as it was on day one - and it's the best I've ever had in terms of brightness and clarity. When the screen gets dirty, I scrub it furiously with a napkin. Glass - it doesn't scratch! The alu body is as tight as on day 1. You'd have to look very closely to see any scratches at all - it basically looks brand new.

The battery lasted until 2 days ago, providing around 6 hours real life usage (on a 17" laptop!). Now it's down to 60% capacity at 500 charge cycles - and guess what, Apple is replacing it free under AppleCare warranty.

Nothing shakes. Nothing rattles. The unibody is just as solid as it was new. As is the keyboard and the track pad.

It's blazingly fast too thanks to an SSD I put in the optical drive spot (though that was a little harder than it should have been).

At the end of the day, this is just fantastic quality and it ends up being not only better but also cheaper than any crap quality laptop simply because I can use it for 2 years. Maybe even longer, who knows?

I just put in an SSD and moved the hard drive into the optical bay. Probably the best upgrade I ever did to a laptop :)

I suggest moving your SSD into the original hard drive spot and moving the hard drive into the optical bay. Apparently the optical bay is slower.

You're generally paying a few hundred extra for the aluminum body, the shiny Apple logo, the comparatively huge multitouch trackpad, firewire, bluetooth, backlit keyboard paired with an ambient light sensor, a brighter, higher-contrast display, and a longer-lasting battery (though a lot of that is due to software). Often times (including when comparing against the ThinkPad Edge) you're also upgrading from a toy Intel GPU to an NVidia GPU.

I wouldn't compare the Dell 5400 and a Mac in terms of quality. We have a pile of dells latitudes that after less than 2 years are effectively paper weights. It's a combination of low quality components and poor Dell software. We are in the middle of replacing them all with Macs. And the users couldn't be happier. Even with a lower power CPU, the Macs are noticeably faster.

FWIW, I'd put the ultraportable mark somewhere closer to 3lb; certainly no more than 1.5kg. My Toshiba Portege (12") is closer to 1.1kg (2.4lb).

I'm not able to find any of those with: 1. a comparable battery life; or 2. a comparable video card, though, which is what the higher-end ultraportables I was looking at for comparison have. For me, the battery is the main sticking point; I could compromise on the GPU.

If you consider that CPU, ram and hard drive is the only thing that matters in a laptop, then yes, apple is definitely overpriced. But mac unibody, battery indicator, magnetic connector, pluggable power unit (to change the type of connector for different countries), etc... have a cost, and I would gladly pay a few more bucks for it.

Last, I got two PC laptops: both were broken beyond repair after 3 years, whereas my unibody mac book look almost new after 1.5 year, and my first, plastic macbook works perfectly (3 years old). The only PC laptop that were not crap in my experience were lenovo, but surprise, those were expensive as well.

"The only PC laptop that were not crap in my experience were lenovo, but surprise, those were expensive as well"

It's a mystery! At least it seems a mystery to many people here. Correlation between price and quality - who'd have thought!

You're not taking into account Mac OS X and iLife (among other things), which are major pluses. Especially when you're responsible for other's tech support.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, just proves Gruber's argument that many people buy PCs based on bullet point specs having never seen the enclosure.

With MacBook Pros you get:

- a backlit keyboard with ambient light sensor;

- a high quality display;

- significantly better battery life than any Windows lapt I've ever seen (due in part to software admittedly);

- the best trackpad I've seen on any laptop ever (seriously... Why do Windows laptop trackpads STILL suck??);

- better graphics than much of the laptops Macbooks are compared to;

- a pleasing industrial design.

3 years ago I would've agreed. Now? The "Apple Tax" is small to nonexistent.

Upgrades are often expensive. That's still true but ever big PC manufacturer does this. Dell is probably the worst offender, offering a really crappy spec for a low headline price and then offering, say, a CPU anyone can buy for $300 outright as a $400 upgrade from a $100 CPU. And that's with Dell's buying power.

And yes I know it isn't quite that simple: Dell may have a quota of CPUs they neex to move, etc but the assertion that they charge through the nose for upgrades is (IMHO) irrefutable.

Don't forget iLife.

Anybody have an idea what would cost an equivalent software for Windows? (Offering similar usability, high quality templates/samples/tutorials etc. Actually it wouldn't surprise me if no such a thing exists for Windows.)

I don't think you have to do that, it's far too subjective and there are free equivalents for a lot of stuff (Picassa for iPhoto for instance).

The easiest thing would be to knock the retail price of iLife off ($49) as that's where Apple seem to value it.

I don't think retail price really reflects iLife's value, if you need such a software. Because iLife only runs on Macs (sold by Apple), the price of iLife can be subsidized. Still, I agree with you that the value of any software (for an individual) is highly subjective.

Also, the big value of iLife comes from the fact that it comes pre-installed on Macs and integrates well with the rest of the system. That's exactly what Apple sells: a hassle-free experience out of the box. No 3rd party alternatives can offer that.

> - significantly better battery life than any Windows lapt I've ever seen (due in part to software admittedly);

My 11 month old Acer Timeline gets me 8+ hours of battery life with constant Wifi use. I easily work full days without recharges.

Your Acer Timeline also uses a CULV (Ultra Low Voltage) CPU. Apples and oranges.

Find me a Core 2 Duo (non-ULV) or i3/i5/i7 laptop with equivalent battery life.

The Timelines are a good budget laptop and much better than the Atom-based netbooks (imho). Personally I prefer the Asus UL30A (etc) range but that's really nitpicking.

Thanks for teaching me something new today. I did not mean to criticize your arguments on why MBP is a great choice. I just had a personal counter-example to the laptop battery point. Now that you explained why, it makes the reason more evident.

I have the Sony Vaio Z (2.4ghz Core 2 Duo) and I can get about 6 hours with moderate usage with Wi-Fi (no flash), and about 8 hours using Ethernet.

Also, I got it on sale for $500 almost two years ago. :-]

+1 for the Asus UL30. Impresive battery life and a nice screen.

I've seen a lot of MBPs. I've used them. They're really nice. I don't dispute that at all.

My Fedora/Win7 laptop has a backlit keyboard, stunning display, and a great industrial design with an aluminum body. The trackpad is dodgy and the battery life isn't as good as an MBP's, but it also has two batteries that are user-swappable. It doesn't run OS X. It also has HDMI out and a Blu-Ray drive, two "premium" features you aren't going to find on the MBP. It cost half of what an MBP would.

Apple sells a premium product, without a doubt, and more than that, they sell a user experience. It's a great one. They make really solid products. You pay a premium cost for that premium product.

The original assertion was that low-end MBPs basically cost what their competing PC counterparts do - and that's just not true.

What laptop is that, may I ask? I'm in the market for a new one.

See my reply to nikster on this thread. :)

There's usually a lot of selective perception involved in things like this.

When you say "X may not be as nice" - that may be irrelevant to you, or hugely relevant to the next person. The point is, it's not the same.

Last time I had a forum argument with a guy who said he could build me a Mac Pro equivalent Dell for half the price. I went to Dell's website - no way. Best I could do was something like $50 less on a $3000 machine. So I dared him to prove it, and he came up with a machine that was worse in every way (oh we don't need a Xenon CPU, let's just go with a C2D... and things like that) and cost half as much. Total joke.

Your laptop that costs half as much - show us a link to the full specs page. This is the internet - prove it.

Mine's an HP Envy 17. I don't typically like HP's notebooks, but this one was too tasty to pass by. I priced out just about everything out there for a new mobile dev workstation, including custom builds, and this one rang all the right bells.

http://bit.ly/d4oj8G

There are many best seller laptops on Amazon in the $500-600 range, so I'd have to disagree.

If you want a midrange or high end laptop then Apple's don't look bad, most people don't though - but then they don't care about the OS either.

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