eMac & Power Mac G4 price gap

messiah

Apologies if this has been discussed elsewhere.



I had reason to cost an eMac earlier today (a product family I've never been interested in before today) and I was shocked at the price difference when comparing a 1GHz eMac to a similarly spec'ed 1GHz Power Mac G4.



eMac Combo

£799.00 inc. VAT

17" flat CRT display

1GHz PowerPC G4

128MB of RAM

60GB UltraATA drive

DVD/CD-RW drive

ATi Radeon 7500

32MB DDR video memory

56K internal modem

Airport Extreme ready



Power Mac G4

£1,149.00 inc. VAT

1GHz PowerPC G4

256MB of RAM

60GB UltraATA drive

DVD-CD-RW drive

nVidia GeForce4 MX

64MB DDR video memory

FireWire 800

56K internal modem

Airport Extreme ready



The Power Mac G4 costs £350 more, and it doesn't have the 17" display?



Now I realise that the Power Mac G4 has an additional 128MB of RAM, which I can buy for £16.44 inc. VAT (I'm sure that Apple gets them a lot cheaper), I don't know how much more it costs for Apple to put a 1MB L3 cache on the CPU daughtercard, and likewise I'm not sure how much more it costs Apple for the additional chipsets/PCI/AGP/ADC connectors. But I'd be very surprised if it costs £350 + the cost of a 17" CRT?



So either the eMac is the bargain of the century, or the Power Mac G4 is fantastically larger rip-off than I originally thought.



Am I missing something here?

ghost_user_name

Actually, the eMac *is* a really good deal right now.



But remember you're also paying for the expansion capabilities of the tower, regardles of how much the components cost. I believe I recall (hopefully Matsu will correct me if I'm wrong) that the towers have the highest profit margin of all, PowerBooks being 2nd.

frawgz

The PowerMac also had double the video memory and FireWire 800.



I suppose your point stands. The problem with Apple's choice of chips is that they have to artificially create a gap between consumer and pro machines. If the consumer machines are to have respectable power, then the pro machines won't look like a very good deal. Otherwise, you can cripple your consumer machines to make your pro machines look much better.

thereubster

Whenever this happens (low end mac looks great> makes high end mac look underpowered and overpriced) it means that the high end will get bumped (or this time hopefully replaced ) soon after. Apple does this consistantly year after year so theres no reason to think they will change now. Its standard marketing practise to use a weakness in your product line which you cant do anything about (yet) to make the rest of your products look like a really good deal - esp. when you know no-one is buying the high end anyway (look at powermac sales figures.... )

messiah

So it's not just me then?



Any clues as to where I could start looking for the sales figures and margins that you guys are referring to? That would be cool!



Cheers,



Cam

thereubster

Apple results figures (I think you can get them from the website) or search Mac news sites they always have them