So?
Apple was getting better pricing on the IBM chips than they are with the Intel chips. Let me dig around for a link.
They are charging what people are willing to pay. Additionally, Apple won’t license their stuff, so they are the sole producer. The reason why PCs are so cheap is because anybody can make one, so there’s competition. Not so with Apple, Intel processors or not.
Price was never the goal of the Intel switch; it was to allow Apple to build powerful computers that don’t require massive space and energy to keep cool. As Squee says, the PowerPC chips they were buying were generally cheaper than Intel chips. (That would’ve changed had they stuck with IBM, as IBM refused to design a mobile variant of the G5 unless Apple helped pay for the R&D.) For the most part, Apple isn’t interested in competing at the bottom of the market, and pricing their computers at a premium reinforces the perception that they are superior to the run-of-the-mill Windows box.
Apple needs higher profit margins than the typical Wintel box builder, who doesn’t have a large design and engineering staff.
Apple didn’t just put some 5 year old Pentium whatever in their boxes, either. The Core chips that they’re using are new Intel chips and, as such, aren’t going to be particularly cheap.
Plus, their new products are better than their old ones. Why would they charge less for a product that there’s more demand for?
At least for the new iMac, the Intel version actually costs Apple slightly more than the PowerPC version did. As someone else mentioned, this is because the Intel processors cost a lot more than the G4s.
To expand on what Nonsuch said, Apple computers haven’t been much more expensive than a similarly configured PC. Usually somebody large like Dell could beat them, but not everybody could with (nearly) equivalent hardware.
Of course Apple was “more expensive” for several reasons. If you didn’t need what they offered, you really didn’t have much choice. In other words, the cheap (<$500) computer was often capable for many users. Not everyone really needed to buy a Windows-running PC with the same specs as the Apple one. Apple has also added some features (like USB, Gigabit Ethernet) in advance of widespread use (to be fair, they’ve lagged on other things like DVD burners). On the other hand, this has often helped with their already high resale value [sup]*[/sup].
In addition, despite some optimized applications, they were losing the performance battle in recent years. So you might be forced to get even more than what you needed to get decent power. This was especially true in laptops, which were stuck with the G4’s awful memory bus for the forseeable future (although a few years ago the Powerbooks were one of the better values around).
[sup]*[/sup] I think the lack of cheaper computers also had a lot to do with their high resale value. If you couldn’t afford a new Mac, a used Mac may still have been capable even though it is older. This led to increased demand.
The Intel Macs are (or make) very good PCs. Some early benchmarks show Macs running XP at very competitive speeds.
We’ve always said Apple makes premium machines for their premium prices. At this point, a Mac is not quite a good choice for machines to run XP on as your main OS, but this should indicate that it’s a fundamentally solid hardware offering.