In my previous post, part of an on-going series about law office technology, I touched on the “Apple tax” and briefly compared the Stream and the MacBook Air, showing that yes, you can indeed purchase a passable device for a couple hundred bucks if you’re willing to put up with suboptimal hardware.
The price differential begins to erode, however, when you start to look at base configuration machines using similar hardware. This isn’t a straight-forward exercise, however, because customization accounts for a lot of price variance. Even within Apple’s offerings, as exceptionally limited as they are, you can take a base model computer and turn it into a very expensive machine. (Doing this does lead to a fair amount of Apple Tax.)
For example: Apple’s website offers two varieties of the 11-inch Air to begin your customization experience. The $899 version includes 128GB of PCIe-based flash storage, while the $1099 version includes 256GB of PCIe-based flash storage. That’s a $200 jump to double your storage space, which isn’t really warranted based on the component price; as of today, on Amazon.com a 128GB M.2 PCIe drive made by Plextor goes for $120 while a 256GB M.2 PCIe drive made by the same manufacturer goes for $243.
Depending on the size of the hard drive you choose (you can get up to 512GB installed), you can then select the processor (getting an i7 raises the price by $150), and add additional memory (getting 8GB of 1600MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM instead of 4GB adds $100 (which is probably not warranted since a Kingston 8GB 1600MHZ DDR3L module only costs $65 on Amazon.com and even at Staples its only $100)), and before you know it, maxing out your $899 11″ Macbook Air will cost $1649; the 13″ model can max out at $1749. That’s getting into MacBook territory: a 256GB 13″ MacBook Pro with a “Retina” display starts at $1499, and comes with a faster processor, a higher resolution screen, more standard RAM, a bettter graphics card, and weighs only a little more.
Obviously, comparing apples to apples is convoluted enough, and that doesn’t even take into account trying to compare computers from other manufacturers. But that is exactly what I am going to try to do in my next post in this series.
