| Wednesday, August 14, 2002 |
09:49 - PowerMac vs. Dell
http://blog.glennf.com/gmblog/archives/00000233.htm
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Yesterday I compared the prices of the new line of Power Macs to the most comparable Dells I could find-- the P4-based Dimension 8200. I did this because it's what Apple compared its machines to in the MPEG-2 compression bake-off stats; I found that if you configured the Dell to match the Mac feature-for-feature, the Mac turned out to be priced at about 150% of what the Dell cost, from top to bottom.
But I overlooked the higher-end Xeon-based Precision 530 workstation, which might be closer in targeting to Apple's machines. Glenn Fleishman recompares the prices using the Precision instead of the Dimension. And he finds that the Mac is actually significantly cheaper, especially when you go for the lowest-end processors available.
I don't know how an 867-MHz dual G4 would fare against the Precision's dual 1.8GHz Xeons in that bake-off, but at least we now have a high-ball competitor to work against as well as a low-ball one.
Oh, and Marcus points out that the Dimension's 533 MHz system bus is actually due to RAMBUS' super-high clock speed over an 8-bit bus. So it's not as hot as it sounds (not that that matters to the number-munchers on the message boards).
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