Fanboys, get your commenting fingers warmed up. A new study shows that, on average, the cost of a Windows PC is half that of an Apple computer. According to data collected by the NPD group, the average Windows notebook goes for $700, while the average Apple laptop costs above $1,500, dropping a mere $59 in the last two years. And that's nothing compared to desktop computers.

The average Mac desktop sells for about $1,000 more than the average PC desktop, which sells for a mere $550.

"But wait," you say, "that's because people interested in higher-end machines buy Apple, while cheap idiots buy PCs." Eh, maybe. But that doesn't explain away the discrepancies.

Specifications often vary sharply for these systems, with Apple often focusing on faster processors than some rivals in notebooks but at the expense of memory and hard drive space. Its insistence on using mobile processors and custom designs for desktops, however, has created feature discrepancies where a Dell Inspiron 518 tower nearing the $700 mark features two more processor cores, three times as much memory, and twice the hard drive space of an $1,199 entry-level iMac despite both coming with near-equivalent LCDs.

While the average price for Windows-based systems is described in the NPD data as having largely flattened and unlikely to drop further in the near future, the disparity between these and Macs has only widened in the last few months, according to eWeek. Apple's general policy of refusing to alter prices until its next hardware revision has reduced the value of its systems relative to Windows competitors.

So while Apple's marketshare has gone up quite a bit in the last few years, analysts don't think they'll be able to keep up the growth with prices so much higher than their PC counterparts. There are only so many video editors, bloggers and rich fanboys in the world, after all. Sooner or later, they'll need to appeal to those cheap idiots as well. [Electronista]