Hey Hey,

I know that everyone keeps saying they are doing this because of pricing... but I don't think that's the case at all.... Apple prices are very competetive lately..

The Mac Mini is quite cheap and out performs any similarly priced PC that you might by at Futureshop, BestBuy or where ever else.

The iMacs are great and ridiculously cheap in my opinion. 2199 Canadian (1780 USD) for a 20" G5 2.0Ghz.... Tell me wher you can go and buy a similarly priced PC that will match it in price and specs...

For this little demo, I selected the Intel P4 630 3.2Ghz Processor as the competitor... I don't know if I'd call this equal as I think the Mac would blow it out of the water, but I'm guessing I'll get some arguments if I go with the Dual Core.... However I remember a prof telling me that a RISC processor will benchmark to about 5x as fast as a CISC processor (although I've also heard that the P4 is actually a RISC processor that decodes the CISC instruction set... ) but what do I know... I'm not a hardware guy... I just know that a 1.5Ghz MAC laptop will outperform our 2.4 Ghz PC laptops with similar applications. So on with the demo..

20" G5 iMac
2.0Ghz Processor
250GB SATA
8X Double Layer Super Drive
Radeon 9600 128MB
20" LCD (Incorporated)
Mac OSX 10.3

Dell Dimension 9100
3.2Ghz P4 630
250GB SATA
16X DVD-RW Dual Layer
Radeon X300 SE 128MB
20" LCD (Seperate from PC)
Windows XP Pro
As you may have noticed, I left RAM out of this.. I've priced out two different versions... Both these systems with 512MB (the system standard for both) and both these systems with 2GB of RAM (might as well go for the gold right?)

The 512MB version is $2199CDN (Mac) and $2739CDN (PC).
The 2GB version is $2598CDN (MAC) and $3639 (PC)

I can buy the above Mac system with 2GB for cheaper than the PC System with 512MB of RAM...

I'm not sure, but I think right now Apple is beating PCs in pricing.... so it really doesn't explain the switch.

Anyways.. that's my 2 cents,

Peace,
HT