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Comment by danfinlay | Hacker News Reader

A lot of that iMac's cost is its retina display, and you didn't bother buying a retina display for the PC. Running a speed test is silly, there are already major differences in the build.

To make this remotely more scientific, you'd either need to buy a 4k monitor for the PC, or use a Mac Pro and just take the monitor out of the equation.

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That's true. They should have gotten a 5k screen with 5120‑by‑2880 resolution for the PC like the Mac. This Dell costs 2000 which would have reduced the available for the PC components. On the other hand if you don't care for such resolution the PC may be the better choice.

If they wanted a more apples to apples comparison in the hardware department, they probably should have added $600 to the monitor price[1] and paid for it by using the same CPU as the iMac (i.e. a 6700k)

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Dell-Monitor-UP2715K-27-Inch-LED-Lit/d...

Honestly, though, I don't think the point was to do an apples-to-apples hardware comparison. This was on a cost basis only.

I guess the issue is the driving factor of the iMac cost is the monitor resolution. It would've made more sense (if they didn't need the resolution) to pick a different iMac and spec out a PC at a similar price point.

The article also leaves out the cost of their IT guy's time to assemble the custom PC components. How much does an hour of Joseph WU's time cost? How many hours did it take for him to order, receive, unpack, and then assemble the components?

My guess would be most of Wu's time was spent researching which components to order, probably several hours. On the other hand, if he's a full time employee, then it does not cost anything extra to have him do his job.

If he is a full time employee then the time he spent researching and assembling this computer was time he didn't spend doing the job he was paid for.

Unless 'researching, building and supporting the IT environment' is his job, as their IT guy

>On the other hand if you don't care for such resolution the PC may be the better choice.

On the other hand it's a Lightroom test -- the target market for Lightroom is precisely those that do care for such resolution.

Why would speed be silly? That is a business, who saves money with every speed increase.

Also, the end of the article shows the next text is a Mac Pro. I thought commenting without reading was a reddit thing, not hn.

These kinds of posts attract the Reddit-ier crowd of commenters that already exists within HN, if you know what I mean. The title gave me that feeling; the article confirmed it; and the fact that there were enough comments to require scrolling, on an article about “Which computer is faster, Mac or PC???”, hit the nail on the head and sealed the coffin.

Retina only good at pixels but didn't mean its color accuracy better than others, like EIZO.

Its color accuracy is also better than most -- it has 10-bit screen colors for one. EIZO equivalent quality monitors go for $1500 and higher even for crappy resolutions.

But the Mac pro hasn't been updated in years. The gpu is old, and this is mostly a gpu test.

The Mac Pro can dissipate way more heat than an iMac, so between the two GPUs it can have almost twice the FLOPS of the iMac's GPU, even though it's several years older.

The article states repeatedly that it's all about CPU clock speed. If that's inaccurate, could you elaborate on how it's actually a GPU test?

That's a bad argument. They spent $1K on a monitor. That can definitely buy a 4K monitor.

You can definitely buy a 4k IPS monitor for less than $1000, the amount they spent on a monitor. Source:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&Is...

Maybe people already have good enough monitors they can just plug into a PC without having to buy a new one every time they update the hardware?

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