Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Should Apple join the other PC companies in pretending to sell a sub-$500 computer?
There has to be a good reason to republish an older column, and I think this one qualifies. This one's for the family member who asked me this week if Apple makes a $500 computer to compete with Dell's $500 computer. It's also for the reader who wrote in last night to ask if I had anything to help him correct his co-workers' misconceptions about Macintosh pricing. It's also for anyone else who finds themselves in a similar situation: under the false impression (or in the presence of someone who's under the false impression) that the major name-brand PC companies actually sell a $499 computer. The article is about six months old, and I haven't changed a word of it, but I did a little spot-checking on the Dell website, and it turns out that things haven't a changed a bit:
A couple of things got me thinking. One was my latest plea for proponents of the mythical "headless iMac" to just get over their fantasy, accept the fact that the $799 eMac is in fact the computer that they're pining for, and move on. The other was a Hewlett-Packard TV commercial I saw this morning, promising a PC for a newly absurdly low price. My question for myself was, why is it that Apple can barely break the $800 barrier, while other name-brand companies such as HP and Dell can offer products for under five hundred dollars? Well, after configuring a systems in the online stores of HP and a few others, I think I've found the answer: the other companies can't do it either.
But boy, they sure can pretend to in those television ads. I'll show you what I mean. While I had no intention of putting together a specific dollar-for-dollar analysis, I figured that my little adventure might be worth writing about one way or the other, so I did take a few notes along the way:
First, I went to the specific site that the HP ad sent me to: www.hp.com/pcad. Granted, I felt pretty stupid when I initially mis-typed that last part as "tvad", but gee, how could I have made that particular mistake? Maybe the fact that I got the URL from a TV ad? Oh well. HP's lame marketing efforts aside, I eventually found my way to the correct promotional page, and was offered two models as choices. And as much as I hate to bring HP's marketing department back into this after only a two-sentence hiatus, I believe that they have in fact come up with the worst computer model name of all time: "the Pavilion a410y". I mean, is it even possible to come up with worse name? A letter, followed by numbers, and then another letter? That's not a computer, that's a license plate. But anyway, at $498.99, I'd found my sub-$500 model.
Or so I thought. Setting out to add the very least amount of options that I could in order to make the HP model's hardware at least somewhat comparable to the $799 eMac, I added an optical mouse for $20 and a CDRW/DVD drive for $100 (both of these come included, of course, with the eMac). I tried to upgrade to something better than whatever "Integrated Intel Extreme Graphics" is, but it wouldn't let me. So while the eMac's ATI Radeon 7500 graphics card beats the living crap out of "integrated" anything, I left it be. Same thing with the bundled HP 17" CRT monitor that I've seen in stores and can't hold a candle to the eMac's display. For all the whining by headless iMac proponents about being "stuck" with a certain monitor when you buy an eMac, H-P gives you no more monitor flexibility -- and sticks you with something crappy, to boot.
But regardless of the this particular H-P Pavilion a410y's obvious hardware deficiencies in comparison to the eMac, I went ahead and gave it the benefit of the doubt. Remember, I wasn't trying to be scientific here, I just wanted to figure out why H-P could offer a computer for under five hundred bucks and Apple couldn't. So I hit the "configure" button, and was presented with a subtotal of $818.99. Huh?
Silly me, I had failed to read the fine print. This computer wasn't priced at $498.99, it was priced at "$498.99 after $200 mail-in rebate". Which is to say that the computer costs $698.99, and those who remember to send out a hobgob of paperwork just might receive $200 of it back in six to sixty weeks, or whatever it is. And that's before you add on $15 to get the current version of the truly crappy MS Works (although last year's version is conveniently bundled free). Don't even think about trying to bundle any "equivalents" for iMovie or iPhoto; for one thing, they don't exist, and H-P doesn't even bother to offer to sell you any of the imitators. So even ignoring the embarrassing lack of bundled software when compared to the eMac, our friendly H-P "a410y" is either priced in the $600's if you believe in the legitimacy of mail-in rebates, and priced in the $800's if you don't. The rebate thing is a debate for another day, but clearly H-P is not offering an eMac equivalent for under $500. They're banking on the fact that most consumers will add on enough "options" like a CD burner or a real mouse, and that enough of them will forget to send in the rebates (or make some tiny technical error in doing so), so that very few if any customers will actually end up with a $498 computer.
So H-P's claim of offering a sub-$500 computer is certainly not an out-and-out lie, but it's about as far from the truth as you can get without being one. So much for them. But then I got to head-scratching as to whether any of the other name brands is really offering an eMac competitor for $499, or merely also pretending to. So I tried Dell. And I really don't want to be rude here, but Dell has got to have the butt-ugliest home page I've ever seen of any company, ever. I can't think off-hand of the names of any companies that sell fake vomit, but I'd wager that they have more professional-looking home pages than Dell. Just blew me away, really. Just because they're offering an undistinguished product, does that mean that their site has to look like something that I made? See, I can make fun of myself while making fun of others!
But even putting Dell's apparent ugly-stick beating aside, the logistics of the site are all wrong, right from the first choice it forces you to immediately make: are you buying for work, or for home? You have to choose one or the other, or you don't even get past the splash screen. That's just sad. Is there some kind of Berlin Wall going down the middle of Dell's product line? If I'm a home user, I don't even get to look at the models that are being offered for "work"? It's particularly insulting, considering that Dell only has one faceless product for sale anyway, just configured eight thousand slightly different ways. Do they think they're impressing anyone by pretending that they're doing something distinct for the two groups of people?
I mean, this is the world's number one seller of computers? I read yesterday that Dell wants to be the "WalMart of personal computers". With a site like that, Dell would struggle to be called the K-Mart of computers. But I digress. I came here to find myself a sub-$500 computer, and while I had no idea whether I would find that in the "work" or the "home" section of the site, I figured I'd go with "home", since that's what (I think) I was in on the H-P site. I guess I picked the right one, because I found myself a model that wasn't just sub-$500, it was way sub-$500. Yep, I found myself something called a "Dimension 2400" for a mere $449. Yowzah!
So let's get this puppy configured. Let's see how cheaply I can put this thing on par with the eMac. I click on the Dimension 2400, and it presents me with what appears to be a feature list, with a series of defaults already selected for me, so just because Michael Dell dresses like a trustable fellow, I go with the defaults without looking at them (because an honest, upright company would certainly have the least expensive options selected as defaults, right?), and suddenly the "new" cost of my $449 computer has conveniently been adjusted to $846.
Now, for all the times that you or I might use "LOL" in online conversation to suggest that we're laughing out loud, there are in fact very few times where most of us are sitting at the computer and are compelled to literally laugh out loud. This was one of them. I also fell out of my chair. Literally. Of however few times you find yourself slumped to the floor, overcome with laughter, this was one of them for me. Darn, I had hoping that such a significant moment would have been caused by something a bit more, I don't know, witty. But life is a series of disappointments -- at least when you're dealing with PC's, anyway. Funny how life's pretty much the opposite when you're dealing with Macs. Maybe that's why I use them. But anyway.
My trusty sub-$500 Dell PC had darn near doubled in price just because I had oh-so-extravagantly gone with the defaults that Dell had selected for me. Oh, I went back and began to try to fiddle with the add-ons to make the thing a bit cheaper, but as I added $89 for a Combo Drive and $50 for a FireWire "IEEE 1394 adapter" (an adapter?), I gave up. At least H-P managed to keep up the sub-$500 charade going until the process was nearly complete. But Dell? They only lasted two clicks before admitting that their cheapest model is more or less price-comparable to the eMac as well.
At this point I was actually disappointed that I couldn't legitimately find a sub-$500 PC, and turned to the last refuge of the desperate. That's right, I paid a visit to Gateway's site. You'd think there'd be a full-scale fire sale underway by now, I mean I thought I'd see them selling office furniture on the home page. No, not new office furniture, their office furniture. They've got to have quite a bit of it lying around by now, what with the thousands of layoffs and all. I mean, computers? They ought to be giving those away by now. But alas, the cheapest PC I could find from the home page was $599. At least they're being a little more honest the competition (or so I thought). Our model was the 510S, which when I clicked on it, I found out had just been repriced (within the past microsecond) to $999.
No, really, I didn't click on the wrong thing, Gateway really is this brazen with the bait-and-switch tactics here. I managed to find the 510SE, which is the actual $599 model, only after scanning the sidebar. But I did even better: I found the 310SE, which is priced at a highly economical $399. Until you realize that it doesn't come with a monitor. Fortunately, the 310S does, but it costs $599...which happens to be the same price as the 510SE. Confused? Good. That's their goal, after all.
But this 310SE puppy was truly bare bones if ever there was such a thing. No word processor bundled, so I added $39 for MS Works. I was able to select a $40 upgrade to a less-crappy 17" CRT monitor, $29 for an optical mouse, $59 for Quicken (which comes free with the eMac)...oh, and then there was this extended warranty thing. For $59 extra, you get I don't know, some kind of service plan, hey that's great, but how do I deselect that? Oh, let's see, I guess you don't. You literally can not opt out of the extended warranty, not with the interface provided, anyway. Is that because Gateway is pretty sure they won't be around to have to honor the warranty two or three years from now anyway?
For what it (isn't) worth, my grand total for the Gateway 310SE (at least I think it was a 310SE) was $829 including the warranty I couldn't get rid of. Throw the cheapest shipping method possible, and we're up to $906. Of course, if I were really buying this, I'd skip the shipping charges and race down to the local Gateway Country Store...no wait, are any of those still open? I can't remember. Seems like Gateway closes its stores these days as fast as Apple opens them.
I could have tried eMachines, even though they're sort of the anti-name brand of all the name brands, but I'd had just about enough of configuring PC's for one day. The store interfaces are awful, the models are stupid, and the deceit and attempted trickery are so obviously transparent that you want to puke. Someone else could probably go to these same sites and try to configure these same models and come out with different dollar amounts (which I think says something in itself about these companies), but like I said, I wasn't doing this to come up with specific prices.
I just wanted to see what these other name-brand companies were doing that allowed them to offer $499 entry-level computer models, while Apple starts at $799. And now I know: none of them are really selling sub-$500 computer models; they're just pretending to, in order to get you in the door. Their actual base models are, essentially, priced in the same range as the base-model eMac. So the question left to ask is not why Apple doesn't sell a sub-$500 computer, because none of the other name-brands really do, either. The question is, should Apple do like the competition does, and pretend that they do?
There has to be a good reason to republish an older column, and I think this one qualifies. This one's for the family member who asked me this week if Apple makes a $500 computer to compete with Dell's $500 computer. It's also for the reader who wrote in last night to ask if I had anything to help him correct his co-workers' misconceptions about Macintosh pricing. It's also for anyone else who finds themselves in a similar situation: under the false impression (or in the presence of someone who's under the false impression) that the major name-brand PC companies actually sell a $499 computer. The article is about six months old, and I haven't changed a word of it, but I did a little spot-checking on the Dell website, and it turns out that things haven't a changed a bit:
A couple of things got me thinking. One was my latest plea for proponents of the mythical "headless iMac" to just get over their fantasy, accept the fact that the $799 eMac is in fact the computer that they're pining for, and move on. The other was a Hewlett-Packard TV commercial I saw this morning, promising a PC for a newly absurdly low price. My question for myself was, why is it that Apple can barely break the $800 barrier, while other name-brand companies such as HP and Dell can offer products for under five hundred dollars? Well, after configuring a systems in the online stores of HP and a few others, I think I've found the answer: the other companies can't do it either.
But boy, they sure can pretend to in those television ads. I'll show you what I mean. While I had no intention of putting together a specific dollar-for-dollar analysis, I figured that my little adventure might be worth writing about one way or the other, so I did take a few notes along the way:
First, I went to the specific site that the HP ad sent me to: www.hp.com/pcad. Granted, I felt pretty stupid when I initially mis-typed that last part as "tvad", but gee, how could I have made that particular mistake? Maybe the fact that I got the URL from a TV ad? Oh well. HP's lame marketing efforts aside, I eventually found my way to the correct promotional page, and was offered two models as choices. And as much as I hate to bring HP's marketing department back into this after only a two-sentence hiatus, I believe that they have in fact come up with the worst computer model name of all time: "the Pavilion a410y". I mean, is it even possible to come up with worse name? A letter, followed by numbers, and then another letter? That's not a computer, that's a license plate. But anyway, at $498.99, I'd found my sub-$500 model.
Or so I thought. Setting out to add the very least amount of options that I could in order to make the HP model's hardware at least somewhat comparable to the $799 eMac, I added an optical mouse for $20 and a CDRW/DVD drive for $100 (both of these come included, of course, with the eMac). I tried to upgrade to something better than whatever "Integrated Intel Extreme Graphics" is, but it wouldn't let me. So while the eMac's ATI Radeon 7500 graphics card beats the living crap out of "integrated" anything, I left it be. Same thing with the bundled HP 17" CRT monitor that I've seen in stores and can't hold a candle to the eMac's display. For all the whining by headless iMac proponents about being "stuck" with a certain monitor when you buy an eMac, H-P gives you no more monitor flexibility -- and sticks you with something crappy, to boot.
But regardless of the this particular H-P Pavilion a410y's obvious hardware deficiencies in comparison to the eMac, I went ahead and gave it the benefit of the doubt. Remember, I wasn't trying to be scientific here, I just wanted to figure out why H-P could offer a computer for under five hundred bucks and Apple couldn't. So I hit the "configure" button, and was presented with a subtotal of $818.99. Huh?
Silly me, I had failed to read the fine print. This computer wasn't priced at $498.99, it was priced at "$498.99 after $200 mail-in rebate". Which is to say that the computer costs $698.99, and those who remember to send out a hobgob of paperwork just might receive $200 of it back in six to sixty weeks, or whatever it is. And that's before you add on $15 to get the current version of the truly crappy MS Works (although last year's version is conveniently bundled free). Don't even think about trying to bundle any "equivalents" for iMovie or iPhoto; for one thing, they don't exist, and H-P doesn't even bother to offer to sell you any of the imitators. So even ignoring the embarrassing lack of bundled software when compared to the eMac, our friendly H-P "a410y" is either priced in the $600's if you believe in the legitimacy of mail-in rebates, and priced in the $800's if you don't. The rebate thing is a debate for another day, but clearly H-P is not offering an eMac equivalent for under $500. They're banking on the fact that most consumers will add on enough "options" like a CD burner or a real mouse, and that enough of them will forget to send in the rebates (or make some tiny technical error in doing so), so that very few if any customers will actually end up with a $498 computer.
So H-P's claim of offering a sub-$500 computer is certainly not an out-and-out lie, but it's about as far from the truth as you can get without being one. So much for them. But then I got to head-scratching as to whether any of the other name brands is really offering an eMac competitor for $499, or merely also pretending to. So I tried Dell. And I really don't want to be rude here, but Dell has got to have the butt-ugliest home page I've ever seen of any company, ever. I can't think off-hand of the names of any companies that sell fake vomit, but I'd wager that they have more professional-looking home pages than Dell. Just blew me away, really. Just because they're offering an undistinguished product, does that mean that their site has to look like something that I made? See, I can make fun of myself while making fun of others!
But even putting Dell's apparent ugly-stick beating aside, the logistics of the site are all wrong, right from the first choice it forces you to immediately make: are you buying for work, or for home? You have to choose one or the other, or you don't even get past the splash screen. That's just sad. Is there some kind of Berlin Wall going down the middle of Dell's product line? If I'm a home user, I don't even get to look at the models that are being offered for "work"? It's particularly insulting, considering that Dell only has one faceless product for sale anyway, just configured eight thousand slightly different ways. Do they think they're impressing anyone by pretending that they're doing something distinct for the two groups of people?
I mean, this is the world's number one seller of computers? I read yesterday that Dell wants to be the "WalMart of personal computers". With a site like that, Dell would struggle to be called the K-Mart of computers. But I digress. I came here to find myself a sub-$500 computer, and while I had no idea whether I would find that in the "work" or the "home" section of the site, I figured I'd go with "home", since that's what (I think) I was in on the H-P site. I guess I picked the right one, because I found myself a model that wasn't just sub-$500, it was way sub-$500. Yep, I found myself something called a "Dimension 2400" for a mere $449. Yowzah!
So let's get this puppy configured. Let's see how cheaply I can put this thing on par with the eMac. I click on the Dimension 2400, and it presents me with what appears to be a feature list, with a series of defaults already selected for me, so just because Michael Dell dresses like a trustable fellow, I go with the defaults without looking at them (because an honest, upright company would certainly have the least expensive options selected as defaults, right?), and suddenly the "new" cost of my $449 computer has conveniently been adjusted to $846.
Now, for all the times that you or I might use "LOL" in online conversation to suggest that we're laughing out loud, there are in fact very few times where most of us are sitting at the computer and are compelled to literally laugh out loud. This was one of them. I also fell out of my chair. Literally. Of however few times you find yourself slumped to the floor, overcome with laughter, this was one of them for me. Darn, I had hoping that such a significant moment would have been caused by something a bit more, I don't know, witty. But life is a series of disappointments -- at least when you're dealing with PC's, anyway. Funny how life's pretty much the opposite when you're dealing with Macs. Maybe that's why I use them. But anyway.
My trusty sub-$500 Dell PC had darn near doubled in price just because I had oh-so-extravagantly gone with the defaults that Dell had selected for me. Oh, I went back and began to try to fiddle with the add-ons to make the thing a bit cheaper, but as I added $89 for a Combo Drive and $50 for a FireWire "IEEE 1394 adapter" (an adapter?), I gave up. At least H-P managed to keep up the sub-$500 charade going until the process was nearly complete. But Dell? They only lasted two clicks before admitting that their cheapest model is more or less price-comparable to the eMac as well.
At this point I was actually disappointed that I couldn't legitimately find a sub-$500 PC, and turned to the last refuge of the desperate. That's right, I paid a visit to Gateway's site. You'd think there'd be a full-scale fire sale underway by now, I mean I thought I'd see them selling office furniture on the home page. No, not new office furniture, their office furniture. They've got to have quite a bit of it lying around by now, what with the thousands of layoffs and all. I mean, computers? They ought to be giving those away by now. But alas, the cheapest PC I could find from the home page was $599. At least they're being a little more honest the competition (or so I thought). Our model was the 510S, which when I clicked on it, I found out had just been repriced (within the past microsecond) to $999.
No, really, I didn't click on the wrong thing, Gateway really is this brazen with the bait-and-switch tactics here. I managed to find the 510SE, which is the actual $599 model, only after scanning the sidebar. But I did even better: I found the 310SE, which is priced at a highly economical $399. Until you realize that it doesn't come with a monitor. Fortunately, the 310S does, but it costs $599...which happens to be the same price as the 510SE. Confused? Good. That's their goal, after all.
But this 310SE puppy was truly bare bones if ever there was such a thing. No word processor bundled, so I added $39 for MS Works. I was able to select a $40 upgrade to a less-crappy 17" CRT monitor, $29 for an optical mouse, $59 for Quicken (which comes free with the eMac)...oh, and then there was this extended warranty thing. For $59 extra, you get I don't know, some kind of service plan, hey that's great, but how do I deselect that? Oh, let's see, I guess you don't. You literally can not opt out of the extended warranty, not with the interface provided, anyway. Is that because Gateway is pretty sure they won't be around to have to honor the warranty two or three years from now anyway?
For what it (isn't) worth, my grand total for the Gateway 310SE (at least I think it was a 310SE) was $829 including the warranty I couldn't get rid of. Throw the cheapest shipping method possible, and we're up to $906. Of course, if I were really buying this, I'd skip the shipping charges and race down to the local Gateway Country Store...no wait, are any of those still open? I can't remember. Seems like Gateway closes its stores these days as fast as Apple opens them.
I could have tried eMachines, even though they're sort of the anti-name brand of all the name brands, but I'd had just about enough of configuring PC's for one day. The store interfaces are awful, the models are stupid, and the deceit and attempted trickery are so obviously transparent that you want to puke. Someone else could probably go to these same sites and try to configure these same models and come out with different dollar amounts (which I think says something in itself about these companies), but like I said, I wasn't doing this to come up with specific prices.
I just wanted to see what these other name-brand companies were doing that allowed them to offer $499 entry-level computer models, while Apple starts at $799. And now I know: none of them are really selling sub-$500 computer models; they're just pretending to, in order to get you in the door. Their actual base models are, essentially, priced in the same range as the base-model eMac. So the question left to ask is not why Apple doesn't sell a sub-$500 computer, because none of the other name-brands really do, either. The question is, should Apple do like the competition does, and pretend that they do?
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