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I consider Macs to be well worth their price, I'm typing this on a $3000 Macbook Pro. :) $30 is what Best Buy charges to remove the bloatware, who knows the actual amount OEM's receive from these companies per PC. It could be significantly higher than $30.

I find Macs more expensive, hell, just look at my current laptop:

My HP DV6000 widescreen laptop which came with 2GB RAM, built in webcam, nvidia graphics card with 512MB dedicated RAM with all the essentials including wireless, bluetooth. Has HDMI, a built in SD card reader, remote control. It came with Vista, but I installed Kubuntu (A OS I currently prefer to Vista and OS X for workstation purposes at the moment) on it (which worked out of the box with it).

I bought this from Comet store for £399, and guess what... That is the cheapest price I can pay for a Mac, and a Mac Mini (I would provide a direct link, but Apple's store links expire) costs £399.

The only 'advantage' the Mac Mini has over this laptop is that it has a 1.83GHz processor, while this laptop has a 1.66GHz processor. But - this machine has been the best gaming and work machine I've ever had, I doubt the Mac mini would live up to that with just a tiny bit faster processor, it doesn't even have a decent graphic card with dedicated RAM.

Macs are certainly affordable now, but you seriously cannot tell me Macs are cheaper.

The big mystery is this Sony TV:

Brand SONY
Dimensions 1.0x1.0x1.0(H/W/D)cm
Television type LCD
TV size 26 inches

  A 26" TV in a 1cm cube?! Wow!

http://www.comet.co.uk/cometbrowse/product.do?sku= 321621&tab=specification

First of all, Toshiba isn't exactly a, how shall we say, 'household name' in the U.S./Western market.

There, fixed that for ya !

I could go on and on. In fact I would be surprised if anybody in the UK hadn't heard of Toshiba.

Bollox.

Nope. You can get a 32" Samsung CRT HDTV for £450 in your local Comet. And I don't care what any salesman tries to tell you, no plasma or LCD screen is a match for a good glass tube. Neither technology's really up to the job, and they're just filling a gap until SED or OLED TVs come on the market. If I was buying a TV now, I'd get this Samsung and get a few years out of it while I waited for the next-generation displays to iron out the inevitable initial teething problems and become affordable.

I googled for places that sell it, and found it at £150 here: The Bug. It translates to roughly 270 USD.

Secondly, the world is bigger than just the US; in the UK, everyone and their brother still sells them like hotcakes.

I doubt that you'll see KR songs that skew to the 1930's or 1940's, seeing as the majority of PS2 game players are probably not in that target audience. Of course, Konami and PS2 have a huge benefit of being able to draw from the catalog of Sony artists (not actually checking to see if Avril, REM, and Cher -- artists currently on the KR game -- are on any of the Sony-related labels). Cross-promotion can be a wonderful cost-reducing thing for everyone.

A side note about my earlier question on the "karaoke DVD/video game microphone adapter" -- it looks like it's just a box that sits between the audio in/out feeds from the DVD/game system and the stereo. I wouldn't want to feed the video through it (looks like it supports composite only, not s-video or component), and I question if I would want to permanently pass all audio through the box as well in case that would affect any Dolby/surround game features from other non-karaoke games... aside from the fact that I'd want to run audio through the optic cable instead of the RCA cables. So, back to the original question: any other suggestions for connecting microphones to a stereo while still allowing DVD audio to play?

The FCC assigned a royalty sharing organization, ATSC, to deliver a "unified" Digital Television system. But ATSC had no motivation to use the improved European-developed COFDM DTV system now the world-wide DTV standard. Unlike ATSC, it works. You can get it free over the air or in a bus. I believe former FCC director William Kennard is to blame. He didn't want to slow down the "lucrative" 3G auctions. Now we're stuck with a broken DTV system, the VHF auctions are delayed (again), and everyone lost...except the cellular carriers.

In the UK, all you need is a $99 box with rabbit ears. US broadcasters are stuck. They may eventually be forced into PPV and soft porn since only rooftop antennas can pick up ATSC. The FCC let this happen. It's criminal negligence."