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I like to save money on a new PC as much as the next guy, but I’m not crazy at the strategy taken by many direct sellers these days–the one that involves there always being multiple sales and “instant rebates” and special offers and upgrade deals designed to get you to Buy Now! I’d much rather than pricing was less of a game and more of a straightforward transaction in which computer companies simply set reasonable everyday prices for their wares.

But even by normal standards, this offer from Dell that just arrived in my inbox is kinda silly. See if you can spot the absurdity:

Yup–Dell is trying to lure me to plunk down my money with a Special Offer of $4 off. Which, if you ask me, shouldn’t be dignified with an exclamation point. Even though it reflects just how cheap netbooks and other laptops have gotten: Back in the days when garden-variety notebooks went for $1500 and up, there wasn’t a soul on the planet who would have been tempted by a discount of four bucks. For a $400 machine, though, maybe such a price cut willl seal the deal in some cases–Dell obviously thinks so.

I wanted to do the math on what sort of discount $4 is percentage-wise, but it’s impossible: I don’t know whether to use the $503 price or the $399 one. Come to think of it, I  also can’t quite tell if the $4 discount is part of the $104 “Instant Savings,” or is in addition to it.

Which brings me back to my initial gripe here. Please, Dell…and everyone else who plays this game…just tell us how much the freakin’ computer costs?

Hey dude, you’ve got a golden parachute. Dell Computer founder Michael Dell has fired the executives that he handpicked to turn the financially ailing PC manufacturer around when he returned as CEO in 2007, and may target lower level executives next, according to press reports.

The reports indicate that Michael Cannon, who has served as president of global operations and had responsibilities for streamlining manufacturing operations, will assume another role. Mark Jarvis, Dell’s chief marketing officer, is out. The duo received a combined US$22.8 million in compensation.

Until now, the company has asked its rank and file employees to bear the brunt of its cost savings. Employees were asked to take unpaid days off in November. Around that time, the company also began to charge customers a monthly fee for premium support.

While the company’s stock value has plummeted, it has remained profitable; albeit less profit than it was two years ago. It has assumed more debt, but its overall financial health is okay.

A Datamonitor Industry Market Research report from Apr. 2008 has Dell with a 8.1% share of the global computers & peripherals industry. Without having to play around with ratios, I’m confident that the company is not going under any time soon. When the world economy turns around, so will Dell–provided it has competent people in charge of its marketing and operations.

Dell has reintroduced the option for Windows XP for its consumer PCs. But if you really, really want Microsoft’s aging OS, you’re gonna pay for it. $150 to be exact–which is up from previous fees to downgrade.

The Texas-based computer maker had been charging up to $50 as late as June of this year, increasing that to a $100 premium around October. Now, the company apparently thinks users nonplussed by Vista will pay even more.

Call me crazy (and possibly slightly biased), but if people hate Vista that much, and are in the market for a new computer, why don’t they just make the switch and buy a Mac? These days more and more applications are getting the port over to Mac OS X, so it’s not like these folks will be missing much.

Anyways, back to the matter at hand. The option, as shown in the screenshot I’ve included, is available on both Inspiron notebooks and laptops. According to press reports, this surcharge covers a downgrade loophole that is available to business customers.

I’m not exactly sure how they’re legally doing this when these are obviously consumer purchases, but I’m guessing this somehow has Microsoft’s blessing or it would not be happening. Essentially how it works is the customer prepays for an upgrade to Vista Ultimate in exchange for a preinstalled copy of Windows XP Professional.

Yet more evidence that Microsoft needs to get Windows 7 out sooner rather than later, don’t you think?

Newsflash to those who haven’t already figured this one out: the holiday shopping season will likely suck for most retailers and product manufacturers, especially in the high tech sector. A survey released Monday by ChangeWave Research shows that few consumers expect to be purchasing desktops and laptops over the next 90 days.

Researcher Paul Carlton is describing the weakness as “a massive breakdown in consumer spending.” With the economy increasingly going south, its looking more and more like people are spending less out of a fear of what could come in this ever-deteriorating economy.

Only 8 percent of those surveyed expect to purchase a laptop in that period, and 6 percent expected to purchase desktops. This was down from 11 percent and 8 percent respectively, and are the lowest readings recorded by the firm since it began asking consumers about their computer purchasing plans.

There is some interesting news however. Dell and Apple are leading all other manufacturers when it comes to what brands consumers plan to purchase. For Dell, 37 percent of potential buyers said they were planning to purchase a desktop, and 33 a laptop. Apple’s results were stellar as well: 33 percent plan to pick up a new MacBook, while 27 percent were considering a desktop system from the Cupertino company.

Carlton express some surprise at Apple’s success — especially considering the premium prices on the company’s systems — and said it is poised to pick up further market share during the period. Consumers seem to be associating Apple’s systems with quality.

What’s working for Dell is the value aspect, something Carlton found consumers were repeatedly saying was influencing their purchasing decisions there.

A sobering note from the study: 59 percent are planning to spend less in the next 90 days, which would include the critical holiday shopping season. Only 10 percent say they will spend more.

So tell us, are you spending more or less this holiday? What’s influencing your purchasing decisions?

When I first tried to compare the cost of Macs versus Windows PCs, I said that “Are Macs more expensive?” is one of computing’s eternal questions. It’s not, however, one with anything like an eternal answer. And the pricing analysis I did in that first article was rendered obsolete last Tuesday when Apple unveiled its new MacBook–which turned out to be a substantially slicker computer at a higher price point.

So it’s time to compare Apples and oranges Windows computers again. Let’s begin with a standard Mini-FAQ on the research effort that follows…

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This is startling: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Dell is trying to sell at least some of its factories to contract manufacturers–and maybe all of ‘em. For any other computer company, the news would not be all that striking; these days, such a high percentage of electronics manufacturing is done by third parties that it’s more noteworthy when a computer manufacturer is actually…well, a computer manufacturer.

But this is Dell we’re talking about–the company that’s been, at its high points, the biggest computer on the planet based on the excellence of its factories and the efficiency of its direct-to-customer model. For more than twenty years, it’s obsessively refined its manufacturing and logistics processes to build PCs as efficiently and cheaply as possible. It is, in other words, a control freak of a company; it’s hard to imagine it letting go of the very process of making Dell PCs.

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Remember when laptops were big, heavy, and cost two or three thousand dollars? Most of the action at the moment involves undersized cheapie models like the eee PC, HP Mini-Note…and Dell’s new Inspiron.
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Pity the poor Mac Mini. After being unveiled with plenty of hoopla in January 2005 as “the most affordable Mac ever,” it departed the limelight with surprising swifness. The glossy white micro-Mac has received only minor updates such as CPU upgrades and actually got less affordable when the base model went from $499 to $599. Last year, there were even premature reports of the Mini’s imminent death, and most Mac enthusiasts didn’t seem too griefstricken at the prospect of its demise.

But the Mini lives–and even though $599 is no longer anywhere near a dirt-cheap price for a computer, it remains the cheapest Mac. It also comes in a super-small package that’s still fun and distinctive. So it’s the subject of my fourth excessively in-depth Mac-vs.-PC price comparison. My goal, as always, is to gauge whether you pay a “Mac Tax” when you buy a Mini instead of a roughly comparable Windows PC.

Before we get started, here are links to earlier comparisons in this series, just in case you missed ‘em:

Round one: A mid-range MacBook vs. custom-configured Windows laptops.
Round two: The cheapest MacBook vs. cheap Windows laptops.
Round three: The iMac vs. Windows all-in-ones

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Here’s a good computing rule of thumb: If you discover a mysterious link in your Clipboard for a piece of security software you’ve never heard of, DON’T CLICK ON THE LINK AND BUY THE SOFTWARE!
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So help me, I’m addicted to comparing the prices of Macs and Windows PCs. That’s okay, though–judging from site traffic, a startling quantity of Technologizer readers seem to be addicted to reading and discussing my comparisons. On Thursday, I contrasted a mid-range MacBook with custom-configured Windows laptops. On Saturday, I followed up by comparing the cheapest MacBook to cheap Windows laptops from Best Buy. And today? Well, today I’m in the mood to look at desktops aimed at consumers.

Apple, of course, makes no typical desktop PCs for consumers; we’re now in the second decade of the all-in-one iMac. The unified-monitor-and-CPU form factor never conquered the Windows world, but several major manufacturers offer units that combine that design’s space-saving virtues with a splash of Apple-like flair. What say we compare the current 20-inch iMac to some Windows-based iMacalikes?

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[UPDATE: This is one of the most popular stories we've ever published, but with the arrival of the new MacBook on October 14th, it's also obsolete. Read it if you like--but this new article compares the new MacBook to comparable Windows computers.]

It’s of those eternal questions of the computing world that never seems to get answered definitively: Does the “Mac Tax” really exist? Some folks are positive that Macs are overpriced compared to Windows computers; others deny it steadfastly. Almost nobody, however, bothers to do the math in any serious detail.

So that’s what I’m going to do. And since Apple manufactures multiple models, I’m going to do it one computer at a time, starting with the MacBook, the company’s consumer notebook.

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