Damn, there must have been something funky going on with the Dell US website this morning. I honestly did get a figure of $1,589 when I speced a 2.2Ghz, 2GB, 120GB D630 on there this morning.

In fact when I speced the "LatitudeTM D630 BEST" option this morning the 2.2Ghz and 2GB were the standard included spec.

So my claims about the relatively cheapness of the Dell were based on crappy data. The prices are in fact very close. Though don't forget that the Dell includes those 3 year warranties, support and insurance. Apple charge $349 for a 3 year warranty on the Pro.

I was ready to believe that the Dell was $400 cheaper than the Apple, because the Dell is much cheaper in the UK than the Apple. For example in the UK the Dell D630 and the MacBook Pro speced the same comes out at £1,000 for the Dell vs £1,449 for the Apple (partly because on the UK Dell site you can opt not to have the 3 year support, accidental damage).

So in the UK a MacBook Pro is £450 more expensive that the D630 and the Dell comes with a 3 years next day on site warranty (the Mac has 1 year of non-onsite warranty).

Painfully, £150 of that £450 difference is because Apple charge you £150 extra to go from a 120GB 5400 rpm disk to a 160GB 7200 rpm disk...

The only reason I used the US sites/prices was because I thought it would be more relevant to more people.

However I can't agree that the MacBook 13 inch is directly comparable with the Dell D630, the D630 is much closer to the MacBook Pro 15 inch than it is to the MacBook (apart from the 1.3 difference in screen size).

For example:

- the MacBook 13 is not available with a 7200 rpm disk
- its screen is only 13.3 inches
- it's resolution is only 1280x800 (compared to the Dell and Pros 1440x900)
- it doesn't have dedicated GPU RAM (both Dell and Pro do)
- it only haves 64MB of GPU RAM (Dell and Pro have 128MB
- it only has a 667Mhz front side bus (Dell and Pro have 800Mhz)
- it only supports upto 2GB of RAM (Dell and Pro both do 4GB)
- it doesn't have a card slot