On The Talk Show this week I mentioned the black MacBook having been more expensive than its white counterpart and a few people took to Twitter to complain that the black version had better specs. My point was that the black model was more expensive than a similarly configured white model, which you could only get as a Build-To-Order (BTO).

When introduced, the stock high-end white MacBook had 1 GB of RAM, a 120 GB hard drive and a 2.2 GHz processor and it sold for $1299. The stock black model had the same configuration except for the hard drive which was 160 GB and it sold for $1499. I was able to find comments that indicate that if you did a BTO on the high-end white MacBook to get the 160 GB drive, the black MacBook was still $125 more.

That confused me because as I said on The Talk Show I thought the difference was $50. Then I remembered that I bought the second generation black MacBook. The high-end white MacBook and the black MacBook of that release both came with 2 GB of RAM and a 2.4 GHz processor. The black model had a 250 GB hard drive versus a 160 GB drive in the white high-end model. The price points for each were the same as the previous generation. I can’t find evidence of this, but I believe that when you did a BTO on the white high-end model to add the 250 GB drive, it was still $50 cheaper than the black MacBook.

Update: Looks like I was wrong, the premium on the second generation was $100. (Thanks to Josh Stoner.)