Back to school goes cheap: Here comes another round of Mac vs PC

Market research firm NPD Group said today that 44 percent of consumers will spend less this back-to-school season. And electronics, despite falling below school supplies and clothing on the priority list, still ranks high on the chart as consumers go cheap and start looking for bargains to keep costs down.

Count me in as part of Club Cheapo. We spent the weekend at the mall, Target, Staples and a handful of other stores as we try to get the kids - who are heading into the 8th and 6th grades - ready for school. All along, we were watching pennies and forcing ourselves to differentiate between what we need and what we want.

Value, according to the research, is the top reason that drives a consumer purchase this season, ranking higher than a school requirement.

As for my household, we made some tough decisions, too. The kids needed shoes and some new clothes - at their ages, they grow pretty fast. We also picked up some basic school supplies - binders, notebooks and such. One of my kids opted to keep last year's backpack and another was cool with wearing last year's gym clothes - they're faded but still in good shape.

OK, but what kind of techie would I be if I didn't make some sort of electronics purchase this season?

The Mac laptop the rest of the family had been using (not being allowed to use Dad's work-issued machine) has been on its last legs for some time and finally suffered a setback. Now, I could have dropped a couple of hundred bucks into bringing new life back into an old machine but I really didn't want to go that route. (Plus, it's an older PowerPC-chip model so we're pretty much maxxing out any possible upgrades.)

Luckily, here in Silicon Valley, there's a Mac warehouse store (called Mac-Pro) that sells refurbished machines that have been traded-in. The machine we bought was last year's model but had been upgraded with some extra memory and the most recent software (OS X and iLife). And, the store is willing to buy my old laptop (for a ridiculously low dollar amount) if I decide against trying to upgrade it.

In the end, we saved hundreds of dollars compared to a new machine purchased in an Apple store (and potentially more if I go the trade-in route.) Granted, I didn't get my free iPod Touch with the purchase of a new iMac from Apple - but we weren't necessarily looking to buy an iPod Touch either. And while we could have stashed it away to give one of the kids for Christmas, it just felt like we'd be spending money today that we really didn't want to spend.

During a financial analyst's meeting in Redmond last month, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked about value and the comparison of Windows machines to Macs. He said:

We do not, say, like Apple, believe in low volume, very high prices, very — Apple is a great company. Does a fine job. But their model says high margin, high quality, high price. That’s kind of how they come to market.  We say we want big market share but with big market share you take a lower price.

Funny how Ballmer talked about "high margin, high quality, high price" when it relates to Apple's products - with my own emphasis on the "high quality" part. But when he talked about Microsoft, he talked about big market share and lower prices. No mention of quality from Ballmer there.

When it comes to value, quality has to be one of the factors. Sure, I could have paid $700 for a Windows laptop like Lauren did in the Microsoft commercial (you'll recall that her first stop was an Apple store) but, for me, that wouldn't have been a good value purchase. Maybe if Windows 7 had been released in time for back-to-school, I might have considered it - but it wasn't.

So instead, I opted to pay the premium price for a machine that doesn't crash, doesn't come to a crawl with multiple programs open and doesn't just randomly disconnect from the WiFi network. And I'm feeling like a got a great deal.

But that's just me.