Pem’s Tech Blog

Obviously it’s for a female not a male, though I had a roommate say he thought about getting a “Hello Kitty” credit card just to see if he’d get any entertaining reactions (like, “you stole this?” or “uh, that’s not a very masculine card”). My comments here are more of a philosophical question about cost and real-value vs. subjective-value vs. fake-value.

My first thought was: is this just an excuse to charge extra for nothing? My worry was that you may pay extra money just for snob-appeal (ie, you pay extra for something that is not actually worth more, just so you can tell yourself “oh I paid extra so it must be worth more!”). In other words, you almost never get what you paid for. Usually you get less or more.

But I think it actually depends on the particular case. There are many cases where I would very strongly argue there is overpriced junk, like a $10,000 dress or a $10,000 iPod with some log and worthless stones/metal on it.

But in this particular case, a $700 laptop is not obscene. It’s not so expensive that it’s obvious whether the value is real vs. fake, so it might be more in the category of subjective. In fact, maybe Apple computers are just as overpriced (or even more in some cases – hello Macbook Air?). But let’s check the details.

HP makes it really easy to do the comparison, because you can configure an equivalent (Mini 1000 XP series) netbook. The same specs for a (HP Mini 1000 XP edition series) is $375 vs. $700 for the pretty one (yes I’m also assuming that we actually like how it looks).

I think percent-wise, it looks bad since you could almost buy 2 of them (well, if you get the $20 cheaper Linux version). But as an actual dollar amount, is $325 too much? $10,000 is too much. $20 or $50 or even $100 sounds reasonable. But $325, I think it’s kind of on the border of subjective-value vs. fake-value. But if someone (yes, probably a female) really likes it, then… I think you’d have to like the way it looks a lot for it to be worth the extra $325. But it’s at least not over-the-top or ridiculous / obscene.

Maybe good for a gift? (Well, that would be a whole-nother issue to consider!)