The only thing Dell is notable for right now is their displays. Also, the price of that Dell laptop is probably always 2,800 but when the company says there are “added savings” it seems like you’re getting a deal, so it’s not too surprising that the MacBook with better components is almost four hundred bucks more expensive. I can still build you an actual desktop that will outperform any Mac for much less.
Challenge accepted.
This time let’s try to build a PC that costs less than Apple’s top of the line desktop computer, the Mac Pro.
Let’s see what the most expensive Mac Pro costs and contains:
- A 2.7GHz 12-core Intel Xeon with 30MB of L3 cache
- 64GB of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC RAM
- 1TB PCIe-based flash storage
- Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each
- The ridiculously overpriced Apple Mouse
- Also a ridiculously overpriced keyboard with numeric keypad
- Mac OS X El Capitan, iWork, yada. . . .
- A crazy-ass trashcan exterior that sounds like taking Darth Vader’s mask off when you open it
- An extremely quiet central fan system with asymmetric blades
- 4 USB 3, 6 Thunderbolt 2, 2 Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 1.4
All for the low, low price of $9,697.00.
Now, let’s build a comparable PC from scratch (NOTE: All prices from Newegg):
- A comparable Intel Xeon processor costs $2,649.99
- Four pieces of Kingston 1866MHz DRR3 ECC RAM cost $99.09 a pop, totaling up to $396.36 for four pieces for a total of 64GB of RAM
- A card of 1TB PCIe storage costs $789.99
- Two AMD FirePro D700s w/ 8GB of GDDR5 VRAM cost $1,321.46
- A Windows 10 Pro OEM license costs $139.99
- The motherboard to support it all costs $609.39
- A CPU cooling fan costs about four dollars
- A Roswell PCI slot fan costs $6.99
- The most expensive fan I could find costed around $64.43
- A Rosewill THOR V2 Gaming ATX Full Tower Computer Case costs $129.99
- Add in the overpriced mouse and keyboard
For a grand total of… $6210.59.
We don’t know exactly how much the exact components, cooling systems, or case on the Mac Pro cost, but Apple could be making quite a tidy profit margin on these Mac Pros.
God, all this research is making me tired.
Here’s a picture to stay on topic:
