The price tags did not rise, but Mac features advanced this week. Is this a way of discounting Macs? Maybe more to the point, can a small business owner or an independent Mac user call his computers inexpensive? I had a chat with a longtime Mac owner this week who doesn’t think so, but still keeps buying Macs.

Analysts and pundits have estimated that the average price of a Mac dropped 8 percent this week. The 24-inch iMac sells for $300 less than its predecessor, and the only thing a buyer seems to give up is one Firewire 400 port and the numeric keypad portion of the keyboard. In exchange there’s twice the memory, more than double the graphics speed, and a disk twice as big as its predecessor. (I know these numbers well, since I bought the 24-in predecessor in January.)

But it’s still a $1,499 computer, my friend says. You can get PCs like this for a lot less. A lot turns out to be around $200 if you stick to a name brand. How much value that $200 represents is the genuine question. Around here, we buy Macs and use them for five years or more. That’s $40 a year difference, about what you spend on one tankful of gas, no matter how big a car you drive. Read the rest of this entry »