Aye, why two on the same desk?

I use it as a TV during the day showing programs or playing DVDs while I work on the other one. It also doubles doing all my downloads in the background so the screen can be used as a TV. Over the top I admit.

The only reason apple kit is more expensive is because people will pay it.
I would imagine that apple's R&D spend is higher than many other companies and the engineering of their machines is way better than most others (see caz'a comments re the insides of mac pros) but basically if they didn't sell apple would reduce the price.
I have bought hundreds of macs for my company over the years and one or two for myself but i don't thin they last any longer .. in-fact it could be argued that pcs last longer because when a component dies it can be easily and cheaply replaced .. try replacing a mac pro logic board - it is 1/2 the cost of a new machine.
I still buy them for my family however because i much prefer the OS and hackintosh is a pain in the arse.
Didge.

Prosecution rests your honour

Who me?

I come here looking for good sound advice and instruction from my PC using brethren and I get called names. How cruel is that?



As I said I am a bit of a Mac Fancat but I hope that I still have all four paws on the ground. I of course know that sometimes Mac v PC discussions can get drawn out but what I like about here (and to a lesser extent the old place) is that it is among friends who like and respect each other.

Macs are often cheaper for a given form factor but not always. The Mac Pro is an expensive bit of kit, but then really good PCs are not cheap either. As I understand it Apple make about a 30% markup on their products I am guessing that some PC manufactures work on slimmer margins and some on fatter ones.

Much as I am obliged to soddit112 for the self build price I don't really consider that a fair comparison. (Though as fair as you can get spec for spec perhaps). To get a branded PC you will I guess have to pay more. So a Sony or Dell machine rather than a no-brand machine would be a closer comparison. After all we are not comparing it to a self build Mac are we?

For example I saw this 8 Core HP machine.

HP Z80 Clicky

It is on offer at $8,999 but the full selling price is $11302. Compared to this the 8 Core Mac at $3499 seems like good value. However I know I am not comparing like with like. (I can see the chip is faster in the HP machine but after that I get a bit lost).

Could one really save a £1000 on a machine from one of the real computer makers or would I have to go to some little no brand shop to achieve this?

CC

The other things is that many smaller PC builders disappear regularly. So in a couple of years the company that built your cheap machine is not there if there is a problem. You cant say that about Apple HP Toshiba Sony or possibly Dell.

A fairer "off the peg" comparison would be a similarly specified Dell pedestal such as the T610 for around £1,500, although it's hard to spec a server so poorly - especially with the drives and RAID.

That HP work station has an expensive graphics card, expensive processors and an expensive RAID controller. It uses server grade SAS drives, rather than the budget components of the Mac Pro.

All of these are extra on the Mac, or not available. If you "Configure your Mac Pro" as close as you can then it comes to £7,360.00, but is still inferior.

*settles on comfy chair*

*gets popcorn*

I knew there would be a reason for the high price. Good PCs are really expensive aren't they?



I do find the specifications very confusing. So many parts from so many manufactures. It does make like for like comparisons very hard to make.

It does indeed, especially on a high-end performance server / work station.

However, the chances are you'll never need to buy a machine like that. Therefore, it doesn't matter to you

Don't assume just because they are SAS rather than SATA they are higher grade. I've recently specced up some serious enterprise systems (An MS exchange system with 45 TB of RAID storage attached for one) and we were often offered SAS drives for a suspiciously similar price to the SATA drive option. When we investigated they were found to be effectively the same drives, just with different cable interfaces on them. Therefore same failure rates, MTBF etc. 'Server/Enterprise quality' is about the biggest [LIFTED] line currently existent in the PC marketplace. As for having an 'expensive' RAID controller, I've seen expensive RAID controllers that ate their disks as soon as look at you and cheap ones that worked flawlessly for years. You could go on the line that 'this is enterprise so it must be better' if you like, but more often than not all you'll be doing is contributing to someone's bottom line just for a line on the packaging. It's the biggest con around after the whole 'finest/choice' range in supermarkets.

Anyway, just as something being expensive isn't necessarily better something cheap isn't necessarily worse. I appreciate this effectively puts me on the fence of the argument at hand but I've always firmly been of the opinion that you should research what you actually need and buy that, rather than buying thing A because 'this list of numbers' has bigger numbers on it than the same list for thing B. One should always resist the urge to buy by the numbers, because everyone putting out those numbers wants their product to look like the best and honesty really isn't an issue.

Jon

I couldn't agree more, but the difference between a top performance disk system and a standard desktop SATA is huge. Of course I'd want to check the facts before parting with several thousand pounds, but I wouldn't want to run a disk intensive business critical server application on the £40 drive in the Mac pro. It would not surprise me if the SAS mirror in the vintage HP we have in a data centre has better performance!

Why? Because it disproves your point?

Check out the Mesh website then for a "proper" retailer, you can get a better spec PC with a 20 odd inch monitor for less than the quad core mac setup you listed.

I don't care but it is clear you pay a premium for Macs, it's a bit ridiculous to think that you don't. Whether that's a good or bad thing depends solely on the view of the buyer.

Mmmm OS X goodness.

Mark

You can get cheap SAS drives, which are basically modified SATA drives, for low performance systems (back-up SANs, for example). but for production machines which need high throughput and multiple user access (multiple read/write requests), real SAS drives perform a lot faster than SATA drives.

Apple sell 300GB SAS drives for 439€ each. But the standard Mac Pros come with SATA drives.

I specced a Dell Precision workstation as close as I could to the 4,999€ Apple Mac Pro 6-core entry level model, I couldn't specify the Dell completely down to the level of the Mac Pro, and I couldn't spec the Mac Pro up to the Dell level. The differences are as follows:

• The Dell has a "proper" motherboard - i.e. it allows the Xeons use their triple channel memory access mode, the Apple motherboard cripples the processor performance, by restricting it to dual-channel mode.
• Dell only offer workstation graphics cards, Apple only offer cheap consumer cards, although Apple want 100€ more for the other suppliers (the 5770 costs generally around 140-150€, Apple want 250€).
• The Dell can take up to 72GB memory, the Apple 32GB.
• The Dell RAID card takes SAS drives, the Mac Pro only SATA
• The Dell includes Microsoft Office Professional in the price (439€ option on the Apple)
• Dell include 15 months AV support

For all the extras the Dell gives you, you save over 900€.

Going for an equivalent to the 4 core desktop of the entry level Mac Pro, you can save about 2,000€.