Although I'm not entirely sure on what you meant by your last statement about top down pricing and drawbacks/motivation, but if it's what I think it means (top down pricing is not good, rebates motivate purchasers), Apple is pretty much on par with the rest of the industry in terms of pricing if you do direct hardware comparisons. Although the Dell or the HP will maybe have a bigger hard drive, the Mac would have the iSight..et cetera - something difficult to compare during the PPC days but nowadays much easier when everyone's using the same hardware (like the intel core 2 duo).
The only exception to this nowadays is the hand-assembled computers which you can usually build for a bit cheaper than pre-built. There's the additional appeal of choosing exactly which components you want, which may not be available - or available at a drastically raised pricing. The only reason why one would think at first glance that Apple is more expensive than the rest of the industry is because Apple doesn't sell any budget boxes - not even the Mac mini qualifies as a budget box anymore...the budget boxes under $500 (USD) from competitors like Dell use AMD processors and older Intel processors. Only when you do a per-hardware comparison (e.g. core 2 duo vs. core 2 duo, 2GB ram vs. 2GB ram) would it show the actual price difference. Lastly on topic, Apple still uses mail-in rebates for the back to school educational discount for iPods and the $100 off printer offer. Other than that, I believe all other discounts at an apple store are considered at purchase. Resellers may offer other discounts off of Mac hardware or accessories, some great ones have already been mentioned. cheers, jane On 9/6/07, .dan. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > A recent poster mentioned using mail in rebates for a new mac purchase. I > know only of the educational discount that does not require a rebate. > > Are these rebates local to stores or web sites? If so where can one find > them on the web? I know only about the amazon lower prices for macs. > > This is one drawback to a mac that such top down price controls exist. It > is a good reason to motivate those wanting to use the software on an off > the shelf intel based pc. > > > XB > IC|XC > >
