I have been looking at the Mac Pros. Not because I have a use for one but just out of interest.

Clicky

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As a fancat I have long held that Macs are not (overly) expensive and are often cheaper than their equivalently specified PC competitors. At these price points though I am not so sure. Anyone know for example what the average 12 core PCs sell for? Also how do the others compare?

Funny you should mention it CC. Was looking at 'books for a mate last night and was astounded that tech only slight better than my 4yr old Dell XPS is being offered for £849!! Not saying that they're not nice and easy to use or whatever, but jeez - expensive much!

A 12 core PC would be expensive, but at least £1000 cheaper than that I would think. The quad core model is laughably priced. You could do that spec for literally half the price in a PC.

Yeah but what would the life expectancy be on a PC? I find that macs last longer so if you did a cost per year over the life of the mac vs PC what would it average out at?

You'd have the same life expectancy on a workstation. HP would easily do a 5 year warranty for a machine of that spec.

Yes they are starting to lose that edge price wise. They could find themselves struggling to meet those sales targets if they continue this way.

Intel Xeon E5640 CPU - £586.74 x2 = £1.173.48

Supermicro X8DAL-I Motherboard - £244.78

2GB Hynix DDR3 EEC RAM - £60.95 x3 = £182.85

1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 HDD - £44.87

XFX Radeon 5770 Graphics Card - £126.39

Samsung Dual-Layer DVD Rewriter ODD - £15.25

= £1787.62 for the parts they have defined. obviously there is other stuff, which i shall add in below:


Coolermaster Cosmos Pure V2 E-ATX Case - £170.35

Corsair HX850 850W PSU - £133.35

Big-Ass Dell Monitor - £867.96

(KB + M are subjective, but a premium corded bundle will be about £50) - £50

Microsoft WIndows 7 Ultimate - £168.11

= £3177.39

so, by my calculations, a workstation PC hitting the defined spec, and coming with keyboard, mouse + monitor would cost around £1000 less than that mac, about what okenobi said

ive probably missed something important out (atleast i hope so for that price difference), workstations arent my forte

If you add in assembly and then think how much better a mac would look on your desk rather than a PC and you might think that the difference was smaller.

It's not about price though is it? It's about what the macs can do and how well they do them. I can't see the media industry going to PCs any time soon. Macs have always been more expensive so this is nothing new *shrugs*

Just passed on a quote for an Apple 24" monitor. It's not about the price it's about the fact the guy wants Apple because of how it looks and the quality. He's not going to worry that it's 5 x the price of a PC one (£509 excl VAT)

assembly wouldnt cost that much, i can put desktop computers together in under an hour

and looks are subjective though i havent actually seen this mac, anyone care to provide pictures please?

It's a macpro - just look on the apple website

Assembly no more than £50, but then quality control will add the same again.

this big silver wassit?

i really dont like that, it looks boring. definitely wouldnt say it worth spending and extra ~£1000 to have sat on a desk.

and wheres the on-button anyway? it doesnt seem to be in any of the pictures

I'll take boring over ugly any day.
I still prefer the G4 PowerMac cases anyway.

Mark

Meh.

It'd be under the desk anyway so it wouldn't matter what it looked like.

Plus it's a workstation so Quadro cards please

I don't think photo/video workstations require Quadro cards. It depends one what kind of workstation you need. They were an option in the past, and maybe will be again in the future.