I’ve got to say watching the ‘I’m a Mac’ commercials were fairly excruciating for me being a Microsoft employee. The first reason: They were rarely factual. The second reason: My wife would always laugh at them. Ouch. So, it’s with some amount of pride I see us finally answering in a tangible way with the Laptop Hunter series of advertisements. I alluded to this on Twitter the other day: “How do you know when an ad is successful? When, instead of Apple fan boys ridiculing it, they start defending against.”

Brandon summarizes a Microsoft sponsored whitepaper here (click through to get the underlying study). AppleInsider.com has a response here. In my opinion all of the discussion surrounding the costs of Mac vs. PC miss a simple, obvious fact. No matter how much you debate processor speeds, memory, hard disk space, screen size, optical drives, ports, operating systems, etc. one thing is clear.

The starting price to purchase a Mac is considerably higher than a Windows PC.

Here’s is the proof: at the time of this blog post these were the starting price points comparing Apple and Dell entry level (lowest cost) models:

Desktop

Apple Mac Mini = $599
Dell Inspiron 530s = $289

Laptop

Apple White 13" Macbook = $999
Dell Insipron Mini 9 = $299

I think it’s pretty darn cool you could get the entry level Dell desktop AND netbook for under the cost of the Apple Mac Mini (desktop) alone.