You're disappointed only because of your preconceived notions and expectations.
Two things.
First, anytime that a product gets better while also getting cheaper doesn't provide that much room to complain. True, Apple perhaps didn't get as good and as cheap as their PC counterparts, but there's a lot of hidden quality in Apple products that gets overlooked when merely doing the "Specs comparison" dance in the PC Market's cutthroat commodity market where they're shaving nickels and dimes.
For example, there's a subthread debating the portability of "5lb" notebooks..
and
As a businessman who travels with a laptop a lot, I have an "earned the hard way" informed opinion on this matter. First off, let me put this in perspective: I've already done over 50,000 REAL miles this year already.
Every pound counts. My last international trip was three countries & eight days...which I did out of just a carry-on and computer bag...but I did leave the iPod at home, to make room for another change of underwear.
So where am I going with this? A laptop needs its recharger power supply packed too. The one for the Dell weighs a whopping 20oz (1.25lbs). But over at Apple, theirs is nearly a full pound lighter because they don't sell the cheap, heavy, solid iron core transformer type. That costs something, and its worth something to me. If its not worth something to you, I don't care...if I could find an Apple-esque 5oz charger for my IBM today, I'd shell out $200 for it, today.
So the next time you're contemplating a comparison, please make sure that you adequately consider the whole picture, not necessarily just your one small part...particularly when you're not making the comparison just for yourself.
Second, when it comes to product updates, we need to remember that Apple is NOT a huge company making gazillions of machines each week with which to amortize off their development and fixed costs for manufacturing.
Rather than go into a long discussion, suffice to say that a product's cost to manufacturer is a function of its fixed and variable costs. If you don't know what I mean by "fixed" and "variable", go take some Undergrad and Grad college courses on Economics and Manufacturing. Or maybe get smart through Wiki. The bottom line is that you also look for inexpensive ways to improve a product that won't eat you alive on manufacturing tooling costs and the like...that's precisely what a minor refresh aims for. This MB update was merely a minor refresh, nothing more. The answer to the question of "why was this only a minor refresh?" I think is very obvious, and have previously discussed...go back to around page 16 to find it.
And on what is Low/Mid/High product range...
And let's make sure that that cheap notebook doesn't have tonnage added with its brick of a power supply, either.
Overall, its not all that hard to make a relatively cheap notebook - - afterall, Apple brings in the mini at roughly the $600 price point - - but what gets expensive is to package it into a compelling package which really has undergone appropriate optimization, and then if you can do all of this with sufficient production volume to amortize down your fixed costs.
The bottom line is that if the manufacturing setup cost is $250M, if you plan to sell 1M units, you put a $250 "tax" applied per unit sold to recover that investment. If you sell more than 1M units, great! But if you ditch the product at only a half million units (because you did a major refresh, for example), you now have a $125M loss staring you in the face that you need to figure out how to pay for somehow. Hope you weren't thinking about paying that off by adding it to the cost of the replacement product!
-hh
