The PC Price Wars are getting pretty fierce. Apple has long been the expensive choice on the shelf, but with the iMac's $1299 price tag, it seemed that they were finally going to be able to compete in the low-end consumer market; sure, it didn't break that magical $999 barrier that analysts had labeled as the sweet spot, but it was close-- and the cuteness factor plus ease of use attracted a lot of buyers willing to pony up the extra few hundred. The iMac was announced back in May, though-- these days, there are $599 PCs showing up on store shelves, and Apple again may be perceived as the expensive option, $29.99 a month or no $29.99 a month. Now there are even reports of computers costing $400, or even $300, coming down the pike. Where will it all end?

Well, according to TechWeb, MacWEEK founder Michael Tchong thinks he knows. At the Streaming Media 98 Conference in San Francisco last week, he proclaimed that "in five years most PCs will be given away." The idea is that PCs will become inexpensive enough to produce that the cost of manufacturing them will soon be completely offset by advertising. These "free" PCs would be given away by advertisers who would have their logos plastered all over the desktop, ads inserted into each email message sent and received, banners popping up every time an application is launched, etc. If you think that "Get QuickTime Pro" ad is annoying, you ain't seen nothing yet. Tchong sees this process as the natural progression from other free-but-advertisement-heavy promotions, like Juno (a free email service that made you look at ads) and Mountain Dew's free pager scheme. If you've lived through the commercialization of the Internet, Tchong's vision may sound unlikely (and perhaps really, really frightening), but certainly not impossible.

Hmmm, so what do you think-- would you use a free iMac if everything you did on it was branded with an Aquafresh ad? Our guess is that if AdPC's ever come about, they're going to be very low-end, restricted to extremely basic capabilities (like running only certain pre-loaded word processors and web browsers), and only used by households that wouldn't consider spending even $300 on a "real" computer. In fact, it sounds like a WebTV module with ads permanently added. Whether or not Apple could ever profit from such a scheme is entirely a matter of speculation, but there's a lot of market share out there still left to be had. Who knows how things could look in five years? Heck, five years ago we didn't even have the PowerPC.