Not quite, they didn't include markup (ie store profits and overhead) in their analysis. That could run anywhere between 20-50%.
From TFA:
iSuppli’s teardown analysis accounts only for hardware and manufacturing costs and does not take into consideration other expenses such as software, box contents and royalties. Thus, the difference between the cost of the product and the U.S. price is even greater than $31.27.
The big problem here is whether you'll be allowed to buy
a mini notebook with 1GB and a 120-160 MB hard disk without
Windows.
Given TFA's reference to Businesspeople and the current climate of data security breaches and cross-boarder laptop seizures, it is probably NOT advisable for businesspeople to carry around more than 10GB of data with them. Rather, they should access it by VPN or via encrypted flash storage.
For the rest of us nerds though, who like to have hundreds of gigs of por^H^H^H relevant facts and figures with us at all times, will be able to do as you say, self-install.
This might have been the case before 2002, but...
Have you seriously looked at the printing interface for OS X? It's garbage. Splitting everything onto small screens with non-intuitive descriptions in that drop-down box might look pretty and uncluttered, but it really isn't productive.
Case in point: A couple months ago, I was helping someone with FileMaker over the phone and we couldn't find the option to print only the current record. The answer: it was in the specific FileMaker print dialog, which was so far down the drop-down list that you had to scroll to it.
While I'm not a fan of application-specific open/save/print dialogs, I'd wish Apple could have come up with something better. For people who keep saying "graphic design, graphic design, graphic design" they must do web-only or have gotten used to how ghastly this is.
Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
