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Apple have always had a reputation for being an expensive option, when considering a new computer or smartphone, but in recent months some analysts and journalists have commented on pricing – we wonder are they becoming a good ‘value for money' supplier of tech goodies?
When we look at the latest MacBook Air for example, the price point in the United Kingdom is actually better than some of the PC based counterparts such as Sony. Take for instance one of the PC based competitors, the Sony ‘Z' Series – the pricing in the UK starts at £1,434 and can rise to well over £2,500 depending on how you customise it. The Macbook Air starts at £849 inc vat.
Journalist Nick Wingfield over at the New York Times says that part of this is down to their growing manufacturing scale and “logistics prowess to deliver Apple products at far more aggressive prices, which in turn gave it more power to influence pricing industrywide.”
When we look at the latest version of the iMac, it seems pretty good value to us with the bigger version weighing in at £1,399 inc vat with free delivery. Sure there are cheaper computers on the market, but how many of them come with a 27 inch screen and a 2560×1440 resolution?
In the US, the iPhone 4S was offered on sale if people were willing to wait in line, spend $199 and commit to a two year wireless contract. In the UK however pricing starts at £499, which doesn't seem much of a deal to us.
Stewart Alsop, a venture capitalist in San Franciso said “They’re not cheap, but I don’t think they’re viewed as high-priced anymore”. When we spoke to a manager in a well known retailer in the UK he told Kitguru “Apple have a reputation for being expensive, but when you look at what they offer on a hardware level now, they generally come out near the top of the group. They are never going to want to be seen as a ‘budget' builder, but in recent years they offer a lot more for reasonable prices.”
Kitguru says: There are always going to be cheaper alternatives, but it certainly seems as if some of their products are being offered to target PC based competitors on price.
Eevery laptop with no discrete gpu can be cheaper, but Apple without a gpu is still more expensive as a laptop with a considerably huge dicrete gpu, It’s a joke, not a walue proposition.
But you can always compare Apple with very few expensive Sony or other companys products and say that apple is becoming a value proposition, but in truth both are overpriced with no better reason than to be exclusive.
“When we look at the latest MacBook Air for example, the price point in the United Kingdom is actually better than some of the PC based counterparts such as Sony. Take for instance one of the PC based competitors, the Sony ‘Z’ Series – the pricing in the UK starts at £1,434 and can rise to well over £2,500 depending on how you customise it. The Macbook Air starts at £849 inc vat.”
Are you really comparing the Vaio Z to the MBA? The two are do demonstrably different you absolutely can not compare them, and to answer the question in your title; NO. Apple never has, nor will they ever be a good value for the money. The Vaio Z uses a full clock CPU, it has a higher resolution display, it can have SSDs set-up in RAID. There is just comparing the Vaio Z to a MBA. The Vaio Z pretty much plows all over it in terms of sheer performance.
I get your point, but the macbook air can have a core i7 in it also.
While to the enthusiast, the Sony Vaio have more options, I think for the guy in the street, looking for a new high performance ultra portable, that this news makes some sense, even if I dont agree with it all. The MBA is actually really competitively priced. Look at the Dell ADAMO for instance, it was much more expensive and didnt offer much more.
I think some of their computers are very expensive, such as the mac pro desktop series. that is a total rip off. but some of their laptops arent bad.