It would cost me between $800-$1300. $1300 if I bought all the parts listed, $800 if I used the parts I already had. And I’m not buying the cheapest parts available but the ones from brands I know and trust.
Absolute, buying the parts individually can save you a lot of money. I’ve built several PCs that were <70% the cost of buying them pre-built. There are many non-name brands that perform just as well, and in some cases, even better than the name brands. By buying from multiple websites, swapping parts with friends, and only buying when you find the best deals/discounts, you can easily build very nice machines for very inexpensive.
I have no idea how you got those numbers, as I configured an e1405 to the upper-end white MacBook, and got a price of $1,109 vs the MacBook price of $1,219, and this is without configuring the Dell for photo and music productivity software which is included on the Mac (iPhoto, iDVD, iTunes, iMovie), which would easily make up that $100 difference.
Did you make sure to upgrade the Dell processor to the T7200? That’s an extra $250 right there from the base e1405. Dual-layer DVD writer? Extra $40. Bluetooth? $20.
Now, add to that anti-virus software subscription and the music/photo/video software, and you’re on par with Apple, if not actually more expensive.
Yes and no: You can save enormous amounts of money by reusing parts, but cutting the price by a factor of seven means you’re upgrading an old PC, not anywhere near getting a new one. As others have noted, the processors in the $2500 MacPro alone cost nearly $700…each. There are two. Those 3.0GHz ones? $900 apiece from NewEgg. AMDs run $100 or so lower lower. If that’s all you’re upgrading, then it’s highly disingenouous to say you’re paying $1000 for an equivalent machine to a $7000 Mac. The water-cooling system is a couple hundred dollars. If you already have a whole lot of hard drives and RAM around, or go buy it elsewhere, you can knock probably a thousand dollars off the price of that Mac, but it down to a thousand? You’re probably upgrading an existing box.
<chipgeek>
Also note that GHz don’t mean quite as much as they used to these days: how big are your caches? Are you still single-cored? You can get a 2.8GHz Prescott for about fifty bucks, but that doesn’t mean it’s a great buy. Newer chips are dual-cored or even quad-cored, like those snazzy Clovertown processors. These things can make a huge difference in performance (depending on what you run), and definitely make a huge difference in price. For example, my long-suffering PC box is running a 2.4GHz Pentium 4, but a 2.66GHz Smithfield (“Pentium D”) isn’t going to be just a little bit faster; it’s dual-core and will blow the doors clean off my tiny little Northwood. In more modern terms, a 2GHz Woodcrest (PowerMac processor) will perform noticeably better than a similar Conroe, on account of its faster front-side bus, and Pentium 4s, even with higher GHz ratings, will get eaten for breakfast (excepting, possibly, the 3.6-3.8GHz Prescott 2M and Cedar Mill chips, which could be competitive under the right circumstances).
Quick check on Pricewatch for a 24" Widescreen LCD display: $650.
That leaves you, if building from scratch, another $650 to buy the entire computer.
Assuming you buy from the cheapest dealers on Pricewatch(which is, in a word, stupid), let’s take a quick look.
Processor: $230
Hard Drive: ~$60
Memory: ~$75
Burner: ~$40
Video Card: ~$60
Total cost: ~$465
That leaves you less than $200(or about $900 if you’re trying to match the price) to buy:
A power supply
case(keep in mind the iMac has a tiny, tiny footprint, and cases like that cost $$)
motherboard(even if you get a normal, non micro, that’s another $60 or so)
gigabit ethernet card
wireless card
bluetooth
keyboard
mouse
webcam
microphone(I think the iMac has this built in…)
sound card
I somehow doubt anyone can get all that for $200, even if you can probably get the ethernet and sound card built into the motherboard for a nominal cost.
I think you are being highly disingenous. First of all, the items you listed are rather vaguely specified. All 2.16 GHz processors are not created equal. Hell, I have a 2.2 GHz processor in my five-year-old desktop.
The basic specs you are listed are not nearly the only ones that need to be considered. What kind of 2.16 GHz processor? What’s the cache, how many cores, what bus speed? What kind of RAM, what’s the data rate? What’s the hard drive interface - how fast is it, what’s the cache?
Aside from that, the iMac includes a lot more for the price than what you listed. What about the built-in camera and microphone? Bluetooth and 802.11g card? Wireless keyboard and mouse? Optical audio input and output?
Also, I don’t think it’s really fair to consider using the parts you already have as ‘saving money’. You had to pay for them at some point. Ditto ‘swapping parts with friends’ - that’s not free, you had to pay for whatever you’re swapping with. And the parts that you’re reusing in this this manner are bound to be slower and less up-to-date than what Apple uses, not to mention older with a corresponding higher risk of failure.
And finally, when considering the cost of building a computer yourself, you can’t just look at the cost of the parts - you have to look at the extra time it takes you. You have to look at how long it takes you to find a good price on all these parts, order them (4 hours?), then assemble the computer (1-2), install Windows on it (2-4), download all the drivers and security updates, all that crap. You’re looking at at least a good 5-6 hours, compared to just “unpack, hook up the cables and go” for a pre-built system. Not to mention the potential hassles if you ever have a problem - if your system occasionally freezes under heavy load, who are you going to call? NVidia? “Uh, it’s your motherboard.” Motherboard maker? “Uh, it’s your graphics card.” And that’s assuming you bought retail (not OEM) versions of all this stuff, and have a warranty to invoke to begin with.
I do have to formally retract my example; I didn’t realize that the new “Mac Pros” (which they’ve apparently become since they switched to Intel chips) are running dual Xeon processors; the previous Macs in that price range were running the PowerPC chips or whatever, which were comparable to your average M.O.R. Pentium IV or AMD chip.
So the price difference isn’t $7,000 vs. $1,000, but more like $7,000 vs. $2,000.
“Photo and music productivity software”? Meh. If I were into Windows shit, WMP could do all of it, for free, too.
I’m not into Windows, however, so I get much better stuff for free. Better (for me) than iWhatever, even.
Anyway, you’re wrong. Your Macbook only has an 80GB drive.
Go here, and configure it with the following specs:
[ul][li]C2D T7200[/li][li]120GB[/li][li]DVD+/- RW[/li][li]Mail-in Warranty[/li][/ul]
That’s $1,074.
Add it to the cart, and apply the following coupon code:
9J8GXZ1S0RXMB?
That’s $955.20.
In other words, $545 less than the $1499 Blackbook direct from Apple, with a keyboard that’s actually usable and two touchpad buttons.
If you’re like me, and you’re willing to settle for a cheaper CPU, you can get a totally awesome screen and sweet battery life, for even less, which (again, for me) is far more important than a steenking webcam and Bluetooth.
Black rabbit, I noticed that you changed the Mac being compared from the white to the black, why was that?
Sticking with the MacBook white I configured this dell with:
T7200 processor
1Gb 667mhz RAM (this is what the MacBook has)
80Gb HD (this is the base HD for the Dell and Mac)
DVD Burner
1yr Mail in service
30 day setup assistance (you get 90 days support with Mac)
Final List price $1,118 vs. the Macbook List price $1,299. Not particularly outrageous.
The Black seems to be a really bad deal, even against the other MacBooks, for your $200 increase in price, all you get is a slightly bigger HD.
The blackbook has a $150 premium for being black–you can get an identically configured white one for $1350.
Whoever said the difference was always about $200 was mistaken. Like anything, the difference depends on a host of factors. It’s never a $6000 difference, unless you’re setting up an Xsan system.
Macs will rarely win on price, nor should they. I liken it to Wal-Mart vs Target. Target generally costs more, but for many the difference in experience and quality is worth it.
No matter how many times I make this mistake, for some reason I always forget that it is not worth attempting even a modestly serious discussion with anyone on the Internet, because odds are that the person I seek to engage – even in light dialog – is a turd.
Well, I think you’re being a little disingenuous with your price comparison, but that’s fine. WMP doesn’t let me do what I need to do with iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. I’m a photographer for a living, and these three programs make creating and burning DVD slideshows a snap. I know of no Windows program that lets me do what I need to do as quickly and easily as I need to do it. Half the reason I switched to Apple was for the iLife series of programs (and Aperture), and it’s saved me $$$ in time. ProShow is the closest software I could find to what I need, and it doesn’t do it half as easily.
At any rate, comparing the white MacBook to the Dell, my analysis still stands. We also have Cheesesteak more-or-less confirming my numbers. For what I need in a computer and want, the Mac is actually cheaper than the comparable Dell.
I wish I had bought a Mac much earlier in my career, but I only got to it this year because by analyzing the costs of both PC and Mac systems, I’ve come to the conclusion that they are about the same price. It simply is no longer true that Macintoshes are sold at quite a premium compared with PCs, and we have several cost analyses in this thread bearing this out.
And, VC03, please tell us how in the hell the cheapest iMac system you can find you’re pricing at $2,500, when a 17" iMac costs $999 direct from Apple? Heck, the base price on the 24" iMac is $1999.
No particular reason - I figured I’d go for Apple’s top-of-the-line on the low end, and bump the Dell up to match.
Yes, but anybody who buys a Dell at list price (if by “list price”, you mean the number in small characters that’s always struck through) is clueless, since they usually offer the automatic discounts and additional coupons aren’t hard to find at all. Hell, there’s a new deal every couple of weeks.
I just configured it with the 80GB drive using the coupon I posted earlier, and got $911.
How so? Apple charges $150 to upgrade to the 120GB hard drive on the white one. That sounds like a $50 premium, not a $200 one.
WTF? I posted the link to the system. I gave you the options I changed. I gave you the freaking coupon code. See for yourself.
If you want to insist on using the base white one with an 80GB drive, then the premium is “only” $350.
Now you’re getting subjective. If certain Apple-only programs suit your needs particularly well, and they’re worth the premium on the hardware, then fine. But MS apparently provides alternatives for most of the stuff that comes with OS X that works fine for some people, who aren’t willing to pay the premium.
If I were to tell you that, due to my particular profession, that, say, a Linux terminal emulator is so vastly superior to the default offerings in Vista and OS X as to be worth paying $350-$500 for preinstalled Debian, and that, furthermore, since it’s so great for me, there’s no objective price premium for the Linux box, wouldn’t you think me a bit nutty?
I mean, fuck, I’ve wasted hours trying to find a decent equivalent to xfterm (or gnome-terminal, or konsole) on my Windows machine, with little luck. Everything I’ve found either has stupid keybindings that interfere with interrupt commands, piss-poor tab support, a retarded clipboard interface, or incorrectly passes environment variables in remote login sessions. It might very well be worth it to me to pay for it… is it worth it to you?
(I realize I’m being rather monomaniacal about the terminal thing, but I’ve been spending the last 20 hours flipping between putty and cmd.exe on remote SCO boxes. scoansi, anyone? Grrrr…)
Just a little note - you are aware that you can run pretty much every Linux application (including all the terminal emulators you mentioned) under OS X?
By the way, I wanted to make it clear that I wasn’t trolling earlier when I said “lol” - my response was just a way of saying that I don’t want to get into a massive penis-measuring contest with tech geeks and apple apologists by detailing each and every component of my PC (which changes on a weekly basis at this point) with price and comparing it to each and every configuration of Mac, with price. Suffice it to say that my current machine design from parts runs about $1,000 with a dual-core processor, 2gb of Ram, and an array of three SATA hard drives, and that the minimum comparable mac that I was able to put together is significantly more expensive.
