PC vs Mac – The Numbers Game

Earlier today I found myself reading an article on ZDNet by Ed Bott about his experience switching from Windows to Mac (albeit for a short time).

I’m not sure how I ended up there – thanks to Google News’ Spotlight / customized news page, I guess. Anyways, he made a comment about how while his Mac was cool, if he wanted to buy the one he’d really want to use it would be astronomically more expensive than a competing Windows machine from, say, HP. Anyways, I’ve seen plenty of articles to the contrary on this point, but I wanted to do some original research.

So, I did some number crunching to see how they stacked up and the results were actually fairly surprising. While the HP was a cheaper system at first glance, I wasn’t able to meet all the specs the iMac had. When I did, the price changed… a lot.

I chose the HP Pavilion Elite 450t as the base model, since that seems to be one of the few (or only?) with the i7 processor. I put it against the 27″ iMac talked about in the article. I was able to successfully match the CPU (Intel i7 2.93 GHz), RAM (8 GB of 4x2GB DDR3, 1333 FSB) and HD (1 TB SATA 7200rpm). Sound, speakers, webcam, optical drive, networking and peripherals could all be more or less matched to equal the Mac (though not built-in and not including BluRay or FireWire).

However, there was no comparable video card on the HP. The Mac uses an ATI Radeon HD 5750 while the highest upgrade available on the HP is an ATI Radeon HD 5450. The price difference between the two is about $70-80.

The biggest gap, however, is the monitor. The iMac features a 27″ LED-Backlit LCD monitor with a resolution of 2560×1440. The best monitor available with the HP is only 1920×1080. On the open market, the best deal on a comparable monitor looks to run around $1000.

The final numbers on these two systems?
iMac : $2399
HP: $2578

There’s no argument that Apple doesn’t offer nearly the range of options as well, any of their competitors, but if you DO need/want all that hardware, it’s not as overpriced as people make it out to be. It’s actually a pretty good deal.