News flash: Macs are less expensive than PCs.

Don’t believe me? It’s true — when you compare them to similarly equipped PCs. I mean, sure, when you use a stripped-down, bare-bones system with shared memory instead of an AGP graphics card as your reference point, Macs do seem pricey — particularly when, as some slashtards are wont to do, they compare low-end PCs to top-end Power Macs solely on the basis of processor speed.

But, as Paul Murphy wrote on LinuxInsider last month, when you compare Macs to brand-name PCs with the same specs (RAM, hard drives, optical drives, screen size, I/O, software), Macs actually come out ahead — and this was done before the new G5 iMac played hell with the price/value equation. Speaking of which, according to osViews’s Harry Rider, a G5 iMac is actually $300 cheaper than building your own PC from parts! (Assuming, naturally, that you don’t pirate the PC software.)

Apple used to charge as much as $7,000 for Macintoshes. That was over a decade ago. (Received wisdom dies hard.) They’ve been getting cheaper all the time, to the point where a 15-inch PowerBook now is cheaper than a 12-inch iBook three years ago, and a 15-inch TiBook in 2001 went for more than a 17-inch PowerBook does now.