About what I expected, unfortunately.
Either way, let's stick to what we were talking about - profit margins and PCs vs Macs.
Sorry, but that's your agenda, and your excuse to try to beat up Apple for what you believed were shortcomings for which they were
entirely responsible for, even though you've told us enough to know that that is false.
Last time I checked, profit margin was revenue minus production costs and it would be peculiar if OS X is somehow an addition to the total production cost tally. OS X most certainly didn't come out of an EZ-bake oven but are you really suggesting that they somehow had a harder job than the guys over in Redmond? How many internal hardware components does OS X have to support, they've used, what, 150-200 internal thingamabobs across the product line since the Intel switch? Given that they generally give legacy support a big fat middle finger, and don't have to make the system work with some 50,000 different components in a billion combinations like the Windows team does, it doesn't exactly sound like a trial of fire.
Supporting fewer hardware permutations is simply one of the ways that Apple controls costs, so as to try to offset their 20:1 sales volume disadvantage vs. Windows.
And nevertheless, the six year old "legacy" system that I'm typing this on is still being supported. Sure, Snow Leopard will be the beginning of the end, but realistically, it will easily go another 1-2 more years...the equivalent of 5 Moore's Law lifespans from a product lifecycle perspective. In general, its a more wise question to ask ones self how many total years of product support is realistic and reasonable?
The reality is that MS isn't really doing any better with Vista's minimum hardware requirements...nor will Windows 7 not result in some legacy PC hardware similarly being orphaned. But if its an old 800MHz Pentium, that's its okay, because that's not Apple's fault...even though that's called a double standard.
Certainly, but as an end user I really don't care what excuses the producer has.
Yet that somehow hasn't stopped you from making
comparisons.
I never suggested that Lenovo or Dell/HP professional machines (Dell Precision etc) are cheap, they're in the $2000+ ballpark...
But you did explicitly say
"Have we filled the $500-$2,000 discrepancy", which unambiguously refers to a price difference.
So how about some examples of where this $2000 price difference exists, at least in my Market (USA)?
FWIW, I don't dispute that there seems to have been some odd currency-based fluctuations in price structures on this past go-around, but international currencies have fluctuated by 30-40% regardless of the product. But if you can really show an order of $2000 difference between USA & SWE prices, then I'd recommend any buyer to instead consider airline ticket and a short holiday, since as per Kayak.com, one can buy a round trip New York - Stockholm flight for under $600 right now, for some days in May, as well as next week.
-hh
