Last week they announced the Video iPod. I personally have nothing against it. However, today, Apple made some announcements about new PowerBooks and PowerMacs. It’s today’s announcement that really bothers me, specifically the new “quad” processor PowerMac. Normally, I’d be all about it, it sounds like a beast. I’m not even going to talk about anything else from here on out. I just want to show “the people” how overpriced Apple products truly are, but first, some background.
I had mentioned my home setup at home to a coworkers before. It’s nothing really that great hardware wise, but it’s more how I utilize it, and the price I got it when it was new. Anyways, I’ve got VMWare ESX server installed on it which allows me to run multiple “virtual” machines on top of the one machine. This way I can have a machine dedicated to specific tasks, instead of everything on one. Obviously this helps for when something goes wrong. Now, everything doesn’t go down if I accidentally mess something up.
Anyways, he realized how great of an idea this was, so he wanted to get a server machine up and running that could do the same thing. Well, he’s a developer, so he didn’t really know what to look for, so I priced out a machine for him. Basically I priced him out a beast of a machine for $2500. The specs of it are listed below.
Supermicro H8DAE ($356)
One Dual Core Opteron 265 ($728)
4GB PC-3200 Reg ECC RAM ($516)
MegaRAID 150-4 SATA Card ($235)
3 Seagate 200GB SATA Drives in RAID 5 for 400GB of redundant space ($327)
Case with 645W PSU ($266)
Now that, plus a plain CD-ROM drive and floppy comes to just under $2500. Now, lets look at the Apple Store to see what you get with their “quad” machine for $3300.
Two dual-core G5 Processors
512MB 533 DDR2 NON-ECC RAM
250GB Harddrive (not redundant and not on dedicated hardware controller)
Dual Layer 16x DVD Burner
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 256MB Video Card
Shall we compare the differences? Yes, we shall.
If I were to get my machine up to all the specs listed on the mac (without reducing any of the components), I’d have to add another processor (+$728), add a dual layer DVD burner (worst case +$100), and add a video card (+$110). Let’s see, adding that all up gets us to $3404. Shoot, just over what the PowerMac costs.
But wait, let’s do a similar thing for the PowerMac.
We’d have to add 4 1GB ECC Dimms (+$1500), and increase the harddrive space, oh wait, they don’t have a redundant solution, so we’ll just go with the 500GB option they offer, even though it’s insanely inferior (+$500). After adding on those, we’re at $5099.
Wow, for a whole 1.5 grand less, you can have a superior machine. That’s really all I wanted to show.