[lallysingh]

Lower-end PCs typically have something like 5% margin, compared to substantially more on a mac. And that's assuming you configured the hardware in a way that someone wanted to buy it before it became semi-obsolete on the store shelf and has to be sold for even less.

The manufacturers have to make up the money somewhere. With a complex product at commodity rates, with customers mostly having no idea what the differences are between them (and for good reason, it's all just a set of nasty price/perf/quality tradeoffs that I wouldn't want to look at), you compete on very basic features and the price that they dominate.

[mseebach]

That might well be true for many PCs, but the ThinkPad range is pretty high end and comparable to Macs in both specs and price. As far as I can tell, it's not just the low-end crap that's affected by this issue?

[lallysingh]

ThinkPads didn't have the software installed. Only the lower-end stuff.

[joombaga]

They didn't have Superfish installed, but they do come with bloatware.