That 3500 is for a DIY build. So, sure, you can always save on labor and hassle, but prebuilt 3090 rigs commonly cost over 4k. And if you don't want to buy from Amazon because of their notorious history of mixing components from different suppliers and reselling used returns, oof, good luck even getting one.
(I've been accused of overuse of acronyms, but that one's rare!)
EDIT: I’m quite confident this is not at all an exaggeration. Unless you have put together PCs for a living. $100/h (total employment cost, not just salary), 1-2 hours of actual build & setup, 8 more hours of speccing out parts, buying, taking delivery, installing stuff and messing around with windows/Linux (I’ve probably spent 40 hours+ in the past couple years just fixing stuff in my windows gaming pc. At least 1 of those looking for a cabled keyboard so I could boot it up the first time, ended up having a friend drive over with his :D)
You have to spec out the parts, ensuring compatibility. Manage multiple orders and deliveries. Assemble it. Install drivers/configuration specific packages.
All of these things are easier today than ten or twenty years ago - but assigning it to a random mid-level engineer and I'd set my project management gamble on half a day for the busiest, most focused engineers least likely to take the time to fuss over specs, or one day for the majority.
ofc. to get to $1000 for that they'd still have to be on $230k to $460k.
In my case I have built a couple PCs before, but it was so long ago that I'd have to re-learn which retailers are trustworthy, what the new connection standards are these days, etc. It's just not worth it to me to spend a dozen hours learning, specing, ordering, assembling, installing, configuring, etc to save a few hundred bucks.
A senior engineer in the Bay can easily pull down $400k/year in total comp, which is $200/hour. The rule of thumb I've always heard is that a fully-loaded engineer costs roughly 2x their comp in taxes/insurance/facilities/etc.
When someone costs the company north of $3k/day, it's cheaper all round to just plonk a brand new $6k MacBook Pro on their desk if they have a hardware issue.
So eventually you still have to "replace everything" to upgrade a PC.
You could also put a 4790k, 16gb of ddr3 and a modern gpu in that system to get a perfectly functional gaming system that will do most titles on 1080p high. Though admittedly we've passed the point where that's financially sensible vs upgrading to a 12400 or something as both devil's canyon CPUs and ddr3 are climbing back up in price as supplies diminish
DDR4 was released in 2014, which would suggest you purchased your mobo two full years after DDR3 was already deemed legacy technology and being phased out.
Also LGA1150 was succeeded by LGA1151 in 2015, which means you bought your mobo one full year after it was already legacy hardware.
Point being, PC-building makes it easier to replace and repair individual components, but in time, upgrading to newer generations means spending over 50% of the original cost on motherboard, CPU, PSU, RAM. Not too different than dropping $3K on a new Mac.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20101219085440/http://www.xbitla...
It means the hardware was purchased after it started to be discontinued.
It's hardly a reasonable take, and makes little sense, to complain how you can't upgrade hardware that was already being discontinued before you bought it.
> DDR3 and LGA1150 were not deemed "legacy" the day DDR4 and LGA1151 motherboards entered the market.
I googled for LGA1150 before I posted the message, and one of the first search results is a post on Linux tech tips dating way back to 2015 on whether LGA1150 was already dead.
And you purchased the Mobo one year after that.
Also, we must have a different interpretation of "discontinued", because DDR3 and LGA1150 were still produced, sold, and dominated sales for way long after I bought that system. At the time (and for the next 1-2 years), consumer DDR4 was a luxury component that most no existing hardware supported.
To do CPU upgrades you eventually have to replace the motherboard but you can keep using whatever your GPU/storage/other parts is. Sometimes that also means a RAM upgrade but it's still better than the literal nothing of modern Macs.
Performance per watt? I could see that being disrupted, but an iGPU in 2022 will be orders of magnitude less powerful than a dGPU, if wattage is ignored.
If Nvidia were on the same node and increased die space to match M1 (ignoring the CPU portion of the die size), they would then be able to run at a lower clock with more compute units and probably match the TDP discrepancy.
An iGPU isn't necessarily slower if the system ram is fast, and M1 was one of the first consumer CPUs to move to DDR5. 3090 has 936.2 GB/s with GDDR6X, M1 Ultra with DDR5 memory controllers on both dies gets 800GB/s.
For the record: I was the first M1 recipient (temporary 16gb MB, stock issues). I needed an Intel MBP because Rosetta ain't all that. I opted for, and was upgraded to, the 32gb M1 MBP. I chose M1 over Intel because it was unbelievably faster for the form-factor. My original comment does not concern laptops. My PC is orders of magnitude more powerful.
TDP is physics. You all might perceive Apple as perfect and infallible and all so lovely, but physics is physics.
I use AMD, not NVIDIA. And "what if" is irrelevant. It's like intentionally neutering Zen2 by comparing it to Intel single-core (as was done all the time). The reality is absolute, not relative. Comparing effective performance, not per-TDP, is what matters to the user. And my network/gpu/audio drops on both my 16gb M1 MB and 32gb M1 MBP under load.
Seriously not buying that "Apple can do nothing wrong" bias.
Take those #Ff6600-colored glasses off. The M1 has unbeatable value proposition in a pretty wide market, but Apple couldn't be further from a universally good machine.