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Comment by flashgordon | Hacker News Reader

actually if you are not doing any iphone development (or mac development) i dont see the point. i am on a dell inspiron (bought early last year) and is very solid. running fedora 9, only log in to XP if i have to (around once a month).. cost of hardware is lower (id say atleast 10%-20%) and you have a lot more freedom with what you can do without running into the JobsWall! plus for webapps i can get it to mimic the production environment almost as is.

Yes it is not as "cool" as a mac, but hey if I wanted my machine to look hot Id have gone into fashion design.

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It's a lot more than 10-20% for a lot of desktop users because Apple doesn't offer a middle of the road desktop without a monitor built in. Personally I already own two great LCDs, so when I went to pick one out, my options were the mini (which has only one video jack and is pretty weak by desktop standards, though small and silent and therefore great for casual use or probably as a media hub) or some ridiculously expensive beast of a Mac Pro. So the price jumped from like $650 to $2,8000.

If I could have gotten something with iMac-like specs but minus the monitor it still would have cost more than a Dell, I'm sure, but at least only by 10-20%.

> So the price jumped from like $650 to $2,8000.

Wow, what kind of Mac are you buying for that kind of money:)

I just looked on Apple.com, that was the starting rate for a Mac Pro. It was a beast though, with 2 Quad Cores. The rest of the specs were woefully unimpressive, but I guess it's like a Lexus where they know that if you're spending that much money, you'll have no problem ordering the upgrades, and they just put the base price there to lure you in.

you can buy an i7-based desktop from dell for $1300, WITH A 24 INCH MONITOR. the i7 is at a minimum more than 200% faster than the mac pro's processors. don't believe me, read tomshardware or anandtech

for $2800 you can get one of the dell gaming i7 boxes that is tricked out far beyond anything apple offers hardware wise, once again, a minimum of 200% performance improvement

the mac math once again does not hold up. and where is their snob appeal? they don't even have an i7 box on the market

Clearly either Moore's Law has been broken or you're mistaken.

> I just looked on Apple.com, that was the starting rate for a Mac Pro.

Sorry, I was making a joke about the extra zero you had in the price. You had put $28,000 rather than $2,800:)

Ha. I guess that's if you get the solid state drive.

No mac user's going to argue that Apple's got good selection in hardware :-) If what they've got fits your needs, you're good. Otherwise...

or should that be "if i wanted my machine to look COOL".. but you get the point..

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