Everyone knows that bang for buck desktop Windows PCs are cheaper than their Macintosh counterparts, that’s if you exclude Total Cost of Ownership. So the difference must be more extreme for laptops right?

We recently purchased an Apple iBook for the business, to do general web development and maintenance work and occassional office work. The critical issue was to be able to run Apache, PHP and MySQL on it. Now, you can do this on PCs, but it’s a little more tricky — I know, I’ve done this. Given that I used to run the business from a Apple Powerbook G4 which was very underpowered compared to the lowest specified Apple laptop you can get today, we chose the lowest specified iBook and added a wireless card. Summary specification follows:

Apple iBook, 1GHz PowerPC G4, 256MB RAM, 30GB Drive, DVD/CD-RW, Airport Extreme (wireless card), 12.1” TFT display.
Total Cost: £729.98 excluding VAT

Last night, I was thumbing through MacUser and found an advertisement for a Toshiba Portégé A100:

Portégé A100, Pentium Mobile 1.4GHz, 256MB RAM, 40GB Drive, DVD/CD-RW, Wireless built-in (Centrino), 12” TFT display.
Total Cost: £769.99 excluding VAT.

So we have a faster processor (based on mere megahertz of course, which is erroneous especially given it’s a Pentium Mobile processor), and a slightly larger hard drive.

I then went to the Apple Store to configure the iBook to the same specificiation as the one we bought and priced it to include the 40GB drive.
Total Cost: £747.23 excluding VAT. Cheaper.