Surprising Revelation

[dreilly1982]

So, I was considering purchasing an iMac within the next couple months, as a post deployment present for myself, but I was also considering building it myself and making my second Hackintosh. The last one I had hacked was a middle to lower end of the road PC I had, and I was successful back in the days of Tiger doing this in '07 and upgrading to Leopard. I figured, hey, I got the know how, and everyone knows how overpriced Apple branded products are, I can do this and save myself some money. Well I just "built" my computer (I put that in quotes because I just added all the prices together in the shopping carts of different sites) today and realized to get a computer as close to comparable in EVERY aspect of the iMac as possible, it will actually cost me MORE and I haven't even added in the price of the software. (As dishonest as some people may view creating a Hackintosh, I DO NOT condone software piracy by ANY means. I will PAY for the software I use.) That being said though, I can't see why I would go through the headache of building and then hacking a computer to work, no matter how easy it had become since the "Good ol' days", if I have to pay MORE to do it! Note I do NOT have ANY parts for a desktop at this time, so I'd have to buy all parts necessary, and I am counting the price of the screen in. My price point was set at the 27" 3.4 ghz i7 iMac, with the upgraded vid card. Feel free to weigh in on your opinions on this, because I was honestly shocked to see the difference. I also did not consider my Military discount as it would have made the price difference even MORE in favor of the iMac. End of rant, thanks for listening.

Don

 

[balamw]

It would be interesting to see the list of hardware you had selected. Can you post it?

B

 

[dreilly1982]

It would be interesting to see the list of hardware you had selected. Can you post it?

B

Intel Core i7-2600 Sandy Bridge 3.4 ghz (3.8 ghz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 Quad Core

Gigabyte GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 Motherboard

Thermaltake Toughpower Grand TPG-1050M Power Supply (bundle w/ CPU)

G. Skill Ripjaws Series 4GB (2x2GB) 240-pin 1333 DDR3

Samsung spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0 GB/s HDD

GIGABYTE Triton 180 Black 0.7mm SECC Steel ATX Midtower Case (could have gone a little cheaper here but not much to make a difference)

Diamond A5970PE52G Radeon HD 5970 2GB GDDR5 (a slight improvement but closest I could come to the 6970M benchmark as I can't put a M class card in)

Apple Magic Mouse and CORDED Keyboard

Apple 27" Cinema Display (Closest competitor would have been the Samsung S27A850D at $799.99 but reviews were less than desirable)

Note that this does not include an ODD, speakers, webcam, or additional cooling accessories, and the price of what I listed above is $2339.93. Compare that to the 27" iMac w/ 3.4ghz and 2gb vid card at $2299.00 and I think the comparison is clear. (EDIT: I probably could have cut a few corners, especially with the case and power supply, but still wouldn't be enough to convince me to not buy a REAL iMac)

 

[robgendreau]

That is indeed interesting. I would have lost a bar bet on that.

One advantage to this sort of build (aside from being your own Foxconn employee ) is expandibility and servicing. I guess we don't know what's gonna happen with Mac Pros, and each generation of the other Macs gets harder to service. It's tough to even put in your own hard drive these days.

Don't know if that's enough of a plus to outweigh the issues of dealing with a Hackintosh, but it's a factor.

Rob

 

[pjfan]

So, I was considering purchasing an iMac within the next couple months, as a post deployment present for myself, but I was also considering building it myself and making my second Hackintosh. The last one I had hacked was a middle to lower end of the road PC I had, and I was successful back in the days of Tiger doing this in '07 and upgrading to Leopard. I figured, hey, I got the know how, and everyone knows how overpriced Apple branded products are, I can do this and save myself some money. Well I just "built" my computer (I put that in quotes because I just added all the prices together in the shopping carts of different sites) today and realized to get a computer as close to comparable in EVERY aspect of the iMac as possible, it will actually cost me MORE and I haven't even added in the price of the software. (As dishonest as some people may view creating a Hackintosh, I DO NOT condone software piracy by ANY means. I will PAY for the software I use.) That being said though, I can't see why I would go through the headache of building and then hacking a computer to work, no matter how easy it had become since the "Good ol' days", if I have to pay MORE to do it! Note I do NOT have ANY parts for a desktop at this time, so I'd have to buy all parts necessary, and I am counting the price of the screen in. My price point was set at the 27" 3.4 ghz i7 iMac, with the upgraded vid card. Feel free to weigh in on your opinions on this, because I was honestly shocked to see the difference. I also did not consider my Military discount as it would have made the price difference even MORE in favor of the iMac. End of rant, thanks for listening.

Don

It's surprising! As a computer engineer, I was bought into the myth of overpriced apple for years.... Until I dipped my toe into the world of leopard. Since then, the realization of the OS with built in features (PDF creator thoroughly integrated as most important to me), the incomparable hardware, and total user experience, nothing can currently compare. For me, the hardware build alone is enough reason to pay the cost delta if there was one, but after a few years of use, I can't settle for anything else out there.

Throw in lion server, and now we're talking complete enterprise control over your entire SMB, with email, VPN, and open directory built in..... It's shocking.

Anyhow, a long reply to simply say "totally relate"! If you want to have some fun, build a business dell Inspiron to try and "spec compete" with the MacBook air 13"... I use compete loosely. Don't forget to throw in antivirus and PDF creator.

 

[leman]

I've been writing this on forums for ages ^^ And btw., you forgot to add in an infrared port, a bluetooth and WiFi adapters. And a premium aluminium LianLi or Silverstone case would be probably more appropriate to the comparison.

The fact is - given the comparison to the competition, the iMacs, Airs and Mac Minis (as well as the iPad) are all very well priced. The only thing which is overpriced is the MacBook Pro. The multi-core Mac Pros are really "cheap" as well.

 

[simon567]

My last PC cost more than my iMac, so I'm not so surprised. People who claim they built a superior PC for half the price are usually using a crappy £150 monitor and listening to fans raging inside their cheap plastic case. People don't just judge cars on how fast they go, the same should apply to computers.

 

[wonderspark]

I'm not surprised that an iMac can be a better / cheaper choice for someone that only needs an iMac, but if you want anything more, it falls short. If you need any kind of PCI expansion, you're left with few and/or expensive options.

iMacs are getting better / closer to full strength these days, no doubt. However, there is still a line in regards to expansion that costs a small fortune to cross, and that line is marked by Thunderbolt. I know they'll make me eat my words someday, and it will be nice to have a 16-disk RAID 60 attached to a minimalist system via one cord for a decent price.