Apple fanboys woke up this morning to the news that Macbooks were cheaper than Windows machines. It’s not true, but these are fanboys so what do you expect? Depth? Clarity? Hah! Suck it, World, Apple is benevolent and wise.
After years of having to invent excuses as to why their machines were price inflated, the fanboys were told by Future Looks that Apple was building the machines at less than cost and was clearly doing it for love.
Futurelooks editor Stephen Fung sat down and added up the cost of all the components in the a nearly top-of-the-line Mac Pro on Apple’s website. He ended up with a machine that included 64GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, two AMD D700 graphics cards and a 2.7GHz 12-core Intel Xeon processor to work out how much it would cost if it were a windows machine. The Macbook Pro is nearly $10,000.
Fung thought that there was nothing remarkable about this list of parts; it’s the way that they are integrated that provides both pros and cons.
The Apple machine was in a cylinder that is less than 10 inches tall and under 7 inches wide, with the power supply inside. Of course this means that it is easy to take it on site or pack with you. So if you are in need of more power, it doesn’t come with the traditional drawbacks of a large tower like the original Mac Pros.
Fung pointed out that you would never be able to upgrade the chip because Apple soldered the lot together.
Thinking that the only real difference was price, Fung looked at all the prices of the bits and came up with a figure that was lower than a compariable Windows machine.
“After tabulating all the major component costs (plus another $99.99 US for Windows 8 Pro), we are at a total of around $11,530.54 US using today’s prices at retailers that actually stock the hardware,” he wrote. “I’m not afraid to admit that compared to the asking price of $9,599 US, the new Mac Pro seems like one heckuva deal for these components.”
He did not even factor in the cost of building the machine once you have the parts.
Fung checked the entry-level version of the Mac Pro. Fung’s match to Apple’s $2,999 Mac Pro ended up costing $3,994.65 in parts, a whopping 33 percent more expensive than the Mac Pro.
The story that Apple machines are actually cheaper than VoleWare has been cut and pasted all over the internet by machines and Apple fanboys.
The only problem with the story is that it is not quite, but almost total bollocks.
Fung built his imaginary PCs using the retail cost of parts from a catalogue. These prices have a huge mark-up which when factored into a build of a machine would inflate the price exponentially.
What is also funny is that his tear down seems to have angered PC and Apple fanboys who noticed that he could not actually buy the comparable spec off the shelf in any case.
In short he did not compare like with like. This has not stopped the story going viral as fanboys everywhere tried to justify their Christmas presents to themselves.
Source: TechEye
