As I wrote previously, we recently made plans to purchase a new MacBook for my wife. After much consideration and planning, we made the trip to the Apple store and came home with a shiny, new laptop. This plan generated some good reader comments, both on the aforementioned post and on the post I wrote recently asking, when is it okay to spend money.

I received some support for the purchase and some advice to not go through with it. I think we made a frugal purchase, though I will say it was probably borderline frugal. We could have bought a comparable Windows based laptop for less money, but we really don’t want any more Windows computers and we are already thrilled with the new Mac operating system (Leopard). We also waited for the MacBook hardware upgrades to go through, which happened about a week ago, so we got even more for our money.

Here are the details of the transaction. The retail price for the model we chose is $1,299. However, I work at a University and I saved $100 with my education discount. (Savings -$100)

We added a DVI to VGA adapter for $19, though we noticed that we did not get the education rate of $17 I had seen on the Apple store the day before (I didn’t notice or bring it up as we were paying). (Savings +$2)

Now for an unplanned part of the purchase, it turns out that Apple is offering a $100 rebate when you buy a computer and a printer, conveniently priced at $99.95. We went for that deal since our office printer has been running rather poorly for a while now. That was $100 more than we had planned to spend, yet if I assume we actually get the rebate (I already have it in an envelope ready for the mail) we are really only out the extra sales tax on the printer’s portion of the total. (Savings +$6.10 extra sales tax)

We went to the Apple store outside of the city sales tax area (8.1%), and only had to pay the county tax rate of 6.1%. On a side note, it’s rather sad that the rich part of town has a lower tax rate than the rest of the city, but we used it to our advantage. (Savings -$26.36)

I used my PayPal debit card with 1% cash back bonus to save an extra $13.98 on the final purchase price of $1,398.34. Hopefully we will receive our $100 rebate in 4 - 6 weeks without any problems. The printer is probably the worst part of the deal, but if we actually get the rebate it will turn out to be a good price for what seems to be a good printer (so far).

It is also worth noting that I was ready with an answer of ‘no’ for all of the extras the Apple salesperson was trying to get us to buy. She actually seemed visibly upset that I didn’t want Apple Care or want to pay for some service that would make me ‘first in line’ for the ‘genius bar’. I guess they must get nice commissions on those services, but they should really focus on being more helpful and friendly.

I budgeted $1,400 this month for the MacBook so we managed to stay just below that even with the extra cost of the printer. If the rebate works out as planned, we saved a total of $132.24 for our efforts.

So that’s it. That is our frugal (or extravagant) purchase for the month. I think we got a great quality computer, one that we really wanted and really enjoy. It’s a solid piece of hardware that if we take good care of will give us many years of great service. My wife is already letting her creativity run wild with the incredible software Apple includes for free and I think this is going to be a tremendous help to her at work (she’s a middle school teacher) and it will give her a great deal more flexibility to do her job (lots of grading and planning that she has to do at home).

The frugal/cheap/quality debate will continue- I think we made a wise purchase. What do you think?

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