On 7 Aug 2006 at 23:41, Darcy James Argue wrote: > Sorry for all the posting, but I'm still figuring this out. > > First, I forgot about the 3-year Dell warranty -- you need to add > $249 to the price of the Mac Pro to get that.
Are you sure you're comparing apples to oranges (no pun intended!)? The 3-year Dell warranty may not be an onsite service warranty, which would cost extra, but I can't quite see if that's what the 490 series includes or not. > Second, I'd just assumed that the Dell had built-in wifi and > bluetooth, but now it's looking like that's not the case. (And > there's no BTO option either. Well, this is where comparing PCs to Macs breaks down. PC users just don't use Bluetooth. And the 490 series you cited starts out by default with built-in Wi- Fi (802.11a/b/g). > So, let's add $249 to the Mac price for the warranty, but subtract > $79 for the Bluetooth+WiFi. > > New Mac Pro price = $4398 -- which is still over $500 cheaper than > the (as-far-as-I-can-see) equivalent Dell. Well, I think your assumption that you have to go with a more expensive model is erroneous. Here's what I get (compared to your original citation of the new Apple): 2X Dual Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 5050 3.00GHz, 2 X 2MB L2, 667 256MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 3450, Dual DVI or Dual VGA or DVI + VGA 1GB, DDR2 SDRAM FBD Memory, 667MHz, ECC (2 DIMMS) 250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s,7200 RPM NCQ Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst Cache 16X DVD+/-RW w/ Cyberlink PowerDVD and Roxio Creator Dell Ed Dell Wireless 1450 (802.11 a/b/g) WLAN USB 2.0 DT Adapter Price: $2,803 You seemed to think you need to have identical components in order to compare, but that's not so, as the two OS's depend on different technologies. For instance, in regard to graphics cards, since the two OS's use completely different graphics subsystems, what you need to compare is not the graphics card model number, but how much graphics RAM is included. Now, of course, this Dell model comes out more expensive than the corresponding Apple, but that's not really surprising. It's Apple's flagship machine, while this is a minor niche model for Dell. This is a super-high-powered machine that would run Windows XP at screamingly fast speeds. The question is: would OS X be correspondingly screaming fast, or is it less so? For PC users, there's also the consideration of Windows Vista, which adds a new graphics subsystem. If I were shopping for an expensive PC workstation, I'd make sure that I bought a graphics card that is compatible with the new Windows Vista graphics standard, which might mean I'd want to wait. But the surprising thing to me is this: a mere 5 years ago, a correspondingly high-end PC would have cost $5-8K. It really is amazing what's happening in the price/performance ratio. And I think it's great that now Mac users will be able to benefit from it, as well. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
