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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, not sure why Dell has such a spread on US vs rest-of-world pricing here.

I know some have mentioned the $699/$599 price could also change a bit in the US come November. The internal assembly and parts seem like they'd cost Dell a little more than Apple's cost building the Neo, so maybe in the US they're selling them closer to at cost, and subsidizing it with the Windows exclusivity and price elsewhere? Not sure, but it stinks the price only applies here. It's a good deal at $699. Harder to justify at $1,000+.

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Easy, it's priced much lower in the US on purpose so that reviewers will directly compare it with the Neo to get more favorable reviews, while in fact it should be compared to the Air from a price perspective (and then it will lose on everything big time except the 120Hz display). It's all misleading marketing.

MacBooks simply have the best value proposition. Compared to the competition at similar price point they are much faster, have much better build quality, better displays, better battery life, less fan noise, etc. Also much higher resale value.

Value proposition is still subjective. Apple should be making money hand-over-fist from the AI boom, but Nvidia is the one that wooed over the datacenter with their high-performance ARM chipsets. Apple's unwillingness to support CUDA cost them a market that was worth almost $2-3 trillion, and forces local CoreML to compete with CUDNN in ways that it can never triumph.

Macs are great if you want a Mac. If you want a flexible workstation, a gaming PC, a retrocomputing build, an inference server, a programming environment, or a headless VPS, macOS doesn't even attempt to cover your use-case. It's the reason why the Mac install base is still vying for pole position after 40 years of "you're holding it wrong" to their users.

Seems like it's targeted at students. They're probably expecting to sell a bunch of them at the time of "back to school" and they'll increase the price after.

At least for Europe, and more specifically France, laptop use in classrooms in high school, is still not a thing. So that would explain why they don't do it everywhere the same and the huge price difference.

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