Apple's Price Beats Dell and Hand-Assembled Computers

Problem with Dell is that they use the cheapest parts available and of course its propitary nature. Ulrika you seem to be an expert with Apple computers. What would you buy to replace a Gateway notebook with the Micro$oft crudware. I would like to have great performance on games, graphics and of course SL.
My current tower is a AMD dual core Anthon with a dual core 6600. It runs a lot better than the intel sodai gomi. However it is still has a Micro$oft OS.

go with Linux

The what?

Check out the link in the parent post. It shows the price for an Apple, a Dell, and a hand assembled computer all with equitable (if not identical) hardware. You'll see that the Apple is the least expensive.

15 year old troll who admits to collecting pornography

great response

See, now your not even trying Ulrika. You're smart enough to know the difference between a market and type of product within a broader market.

Hmm. It depends on your budget. Check out store.apple.com and play with some configurations of laptops and desktops. If you're a student, be sure to use the student store as you'll save some money.

35 year old troll who admits to collecting pornography

you and I both know he's at least 18, just so downloading porn is legal

there was nothing trollish about that statement Ms. Uma. now please go back under your bridge and wait for the three billygoats...

or these guys

great group of guys there

Incidently, AnandTech shops like moneys. By using price-trawler sites, I was able to knock the price of the hand-built system under the price of the mac equivilant, and that's including a case, powersupply, and OS (Linux, granted, but it's a workstation, dur)

While I am not "rich" have set aside 2k for this project. Am not a student either my ASU days are long over.

Would like a notebook that will have settings for a left handed mouse. The tyranny and abuse of the right handed ones. The gateway refuses to exchange mouse functions

0.o Mouse handedness is a basic windows setting. Brand should be completely irrelivent.

So Sorry! That function is greyed out on my machine and even tech support at Gateway could not help. It has something to do with the touchscreen. They suggested that I learn to use the mouse with my right hand after all most left handed people use the mouse with their right hand. baka otoko!

1. Yes, the mac pro is cheaper than other systems in a comparable configuration.

The problem is. The basic configuration is more or less useless. Apple is using the Dell mechanism of offerering a very basic initial configuration for a very cheap price (in the workstation range). Then getting their profit margins from the extended configurations.

So what did you buy Ulrika? The cheap basic configuration with the crappy videocard and the very small amount of memory? Or the overpriced configuration with the high end videocard and the extremely expensive FB-DIMM memory and harddrives?

Luckily it's possible to buy all parts of an extended configuration from separate vendors.
Apple won't like you, but your wallet will.

The extremely expensive FB-DIMM memory eliminates a signifcant source of system bottleneck. The hierarchy rules for tuning a system are:

1: avoid paging:
1a: low latency RAM
1b: lots of it.
2: Hard Drive speed
2a: SCSI or other highspeed bus
2b: low-latency memory buffer
3: Processor/system bus speed
4: Data intensive/computationally intensive functions moved to dedicated silicon
4a: GPU's / graphics cards with bus mastering
5: Operating system/algorithm tuning.

And if you buy all those parts from separate vendors, Apple will say "Qua?" when you call them to get support - because most people don't have the time, knowledge, expertise, or money (or access to data) to ensure that the /bios revision/ of the device they're purchasing works properly on the system they have. I've seen IDE CD-ROM burners lag a system out because of crappy spec parts. It just isn't worth it to me, and I've been a professional PC repair, professional systems administrator, builder, etc.

To me, $2500 for a computer /is/ mid-grade, but then, I just finished speccing a $10000 system that a vendor was pitching to me for $22,000.

On running windows XP on your Intel Mac:

1. Playing the latest windows games.
Although bootcamp runs quite stable now, the video drivers for the gfx card, are part of the distribution. (And specifically written for the custom bios version in Apple gfx cards).
What this means is, that if your newest games needs the latest drivers to run without any bugs/artifacts, they're just not available for the apple gfx cards.
This won't be a big problem for a lot of the currently available games, but can be troublesome when you just assume that any and all windows games will run without problems on your new Intel Mac.

Next to that, almost all high end mac gfx cards run at lower clock speeds as their PC counterparts, but cost the same or a premium of the PC versions.

It's possible to add any 'windows' (directX compat. bios) gfx card to the mac, but there's three issues:
- The PCIe configuration on mac pro is meant for mostly multigfx card support to support large monitor arrays. This means: No SLI/Crossfire support.
- Not all macs have the required power connectors for high end gfx cards
- The newly bought expensive gfx card is useless while running MacOS

2. Using Bootcamp to run windows apps.
Since the universal binaries for Adobe and Microsoft products are not available till 2nd quarter 2007. You're forced to run them in Rosetta. (Basically turning your top of the line mac pro into something performing less than a G5.)
Bootcamp, and using the windows versions of these applications is a solution to have the full native power of these machines, but it will require a constant switch between the two operating systems, which is not really practical.

An alternative is using the new native virtualization options of the new Core Duo/Woodcrest processors. This means, running a 'virtual PC', but with native speed on your MacOS. This also allows for running much more than just Windows, like any Linux distro. etc. I suggest checking out parallels, to really get the best of both (all) worlds.

FB-DIMMS aren't low latency compared to unbuffered DDR2. They're meant to allow many more ram modules on the same board, by serializing the datastream. But this also means that they need to constantly convert between serial bus to the internal parallel bus.
They offer more memory though (16GB max on a Mac Pro atm). But the advantage of FB-DIMMS over DDR2 only is apparent when we're talking about systems using more than 8GB of memory.

Apple decided to put a server processor/chipset in a desktop/workstation machine, the FB-DIMMS are a result of this decision, although completely useless for anything but real high end workstations. Ofcourse, all related to 2006, as things will be different within a few years.

AH! I see now!! Disdain of Porn? Frigidity! Common among most housewives & Christian women.

So what'd you learn today on Oprah, Uma??

6600 is a video card.

Other than that? Just go buy the PRO version of XP. Home version is for suckers.

Never keep the OS the manufacturers give you. It's bloated with all their crap.

As an alternative you can always give Linux a try.

OH! And ditch IE and Outlook Express. Try the other alternative browsers/mail readers.

The processor is a dual core athon. The graphics card is a 6600 processor taking up two pci slots in SLI mode it also has dual processors. The motherboard is an AZUS.
My computer is a "hand built" running XP Pro. I run firefox as my broswer.
It runs FS9( very well giving me frame rates over 50. My beef is the OS is still Micro$oft and it does everthing in the new STUPID Microcrud way.

I just think it's hilarious when people say that $2,500 is what one should expect to spend for a mid grade PC machine. That might be the case if you don't build your computer yourself, but when you build one yourself, a mid grade computer is more like $1,400 and a high end computer is about $2,000-$2,300. (and a low-end computer is around $700-$800)