Mac vs. PC: Does Apple Cost More -- Or Not?Mac vs. PC: Does Apple Cost More -- Or Not?

Everyone keeps telling me that Macs are no longer more expensive than equivalent PCs, but I didn't believe it. I still don't, but you can decide for yourself.Like most everyone else, I've always assumed that Macintoshes cost more than the equivalent PCs. But recently I've been seeing more and more people claiming that Apple hardware no longer carries a premium.

In fact, I recently found myself in a friendly email war on this very topic with Jake Widman, one of bMighty's resident Mac enthusiasts.

Jake cited recent pieces in The Baltimore Sun and Popular Mechanics to bolster his point.

And he does have a point. If you take a quick look around, you can easily find computers from Dell and HP and so on for about the same price as a roughly equivalent iMac or Macbook.

But there's more to the story. Turns out that if you keep looking you'll quickly find many other PCs with similar configurations for less -- often a lot less -- than the Macs or the highest-priced PCs. Either from other brands that are generally cheaper, or on one of the many sales that always seem to be going on.

To prove it, I went looking online for a PC equivalent to Apple's $1999 Macbook Pro. At Dell.com -- the first place I looked -- I found a couple of similar machines with similar prices. Within 3 minutes I also found an XPS M1530 with a list price of $2,178. But it turns out that the XMP M1530 is on sale for $1,429 (when upgraded to the same speed chip as the Macbook Pro -- and you get 4MB of RAM instead of 2MB).

Of course, this is just one example, and Alan Zeichick, bMighty's other resident Mac expert recently pointed out hat some Macintosh bargains can occasionally be found.

But there's no question that with all the PC vendors out there, there are a lot more sales of PC products than Mac products. And even a few minutes of comparison shopping is bound to turn up a PC equivalent at a much lower price.

You can argue that Macs are better, but I don't think you can argue that they don't cost more.