To Mac or not to Mac?

[Len911]

Just for the heck of it I spec'd an imac, and spec'd a build your own from newegg. There are similarities and differences. I spec'd the imac, to have a 27" monitor, and the 3.4ghz i7 sandy bridge quadcore, and 8gb of memory for $2,399 at the Apple store online. The windows unit was $1935. A 24% price difference. Of course the thing about specing a build-your-own, is that you can custom spec your features and not have to purchase components you don't want, and upgrade items you do. The windows unit had the same processor, the motherboard however, I splurged, and spec'd one that has an onboard 20gb ssd for the intel smart response technology, that basically caches your most used data from the HD, such as your operating system and allows you to use slower hd, not available on the mac. the differences in the hd drive on the mac is that the windows hd is 6gb/sec instead of 3gb/sec. the graphics cards were identical, except the only one available was 2gb instead of 1gb in the mac. The monitor on the windows also had a built in camera. The mac had 2 thunderbolt ports for peripherals, which is not available for windows, 10gb/sec, whereas usb 3.0 is 5gb/sec. The keyboard also has a trackpad. bluetooth was added to windows unit, basically I didn't leave anything out on the windows unit that was on the mac if it was available. The windows dvd optical drive was faster because there weren't any available as slow as the mac, thunderbolt however may or may not give an advantage or make up the difference, I don't know. The windows unit had 14 usb 2.0 ports, 4 usb 3.0 ports, 1 s/pdif out, 6 audio outs, 2 firewire. Also in the windows you can tweak the chip speed in the bios. The mac has 90 days telephone support, and 1 year warranty. Windows unit doesn't have telephone support included, it would be extra. The warranties are on the individual components. The case for example was 2 years parts and labor, ps 5/5, 3/3 for the processor, memory lifetime/lifetime, hd 5/5, etc. You have to assemble the build-you-own. The case was the same as Marc spec'd, a big nice coolermaster, the power supply the same 700w, I don't know what is in the mac. The mouse functions that are specific to the mac probably can't be replicated in the windows unit, I'm not sure if the monitor and onboard camera would work as well in the windows unit as might the mac. I don't know how useable the s/pdif out, or the audio outs on the windows unit might be. If you assembled the build-your-own, it might take a day, if you read, and re-read, taking your time checking, double-checking and re-checking to make sure everything was aligned properly, the chip and memory, all the power and motherboard cables were properly connected, etc.

I'd probably give the edge to the mac for thunderbolt, and mouse functions, and maybe the integration of the camera in the monitor, and no assy required, and the edge to the build-your own for customability, price/performance ratio. This is just sort of an off the wall comparison because if I had gotten closer to spec in the mac, the price would have tumbled some more, but oth, if you can splurge and get even better performance or a nicer case for less, that's hard to resist.