People love Apple's Mac Books. They're stylish, rugged, and powerful. They're also incredibly expensive for the level of hardware and software you get for your Apple bucks. You can probably Google this and find lots of folks who have done price comparisons between a Mac Book and a comparable PC, and you'll find that there's a substantial difference in price. People refer to this as the "Apple Tax" - the amount you're willing to pay just because it was designed by Apple and looks purty (as they say here in PA).
To compete for your extra bucks, Dell recently launched their new "Adamo" laptop, also stylish, rugged and powerful. Their top entry in this class comes with a 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo chip, 128GB SSD drive, 4GB of RAM, Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit and mobile broadband for $2,699. That's a whole lot of Benjamins for a machine that is light on power but heavy on asthetics.
To see just how much of a "Dell Tax" is figured into this thing, I specced out a Dell Inspiron with similar parts, and came out at $849. It's not a true apples-to-apples (no pun intended) comparison because you can't get the Inspiron something as small as a 1.4GHz Intel chip and the smallest drive you can get for the Inspiron is an SATA 120GB unit. In short, the Inspiron is more powerful than the Adamo.
Adamo for $2,699. Inspiron for $849. By my reckoning, that's $1,850 in asthetics but I'm heretofore referring to it as the Dell Tax.
Posted
Mar 22 2009, 10:21 AM
by
Jody Farr