- by Paul Murphy -

Everyone knows PCs are faster than Macs, but Macs cost more. Right?

There are two issues here: cost and performance. Right now I want to focus on the cost side of the myth leaving performance for another column, possibly in late September.

For today, therefore, I'm simply going to argue that Macs and PCs are optimized for very different kinds of jobs and thus cater to different perceptions of what constitutes performance. Fundamentally what counts for both is suitability to purpose, not bits shuffled per second.

That suitability to purpose idea is reflected on the cost side by the Mac's commitment to multimedia components, such as the SuperDrive and firewire connectivity, missing on the PC. On the performance side it's reflected in the software supplier's commitment to the Mac with the general consequence that Macs are faster where the supplier made good use of unique Mac features such as the true multi-processing capabilities on OS X or the Altivec short array processor, and PCs are faster for software ported, essentially unchanged, from the PC.

desktops

If we take vaguely comparable units from the low end, mid range, and high end of the Apple and PC lines using pricing from the Apple and Dell web stores as of August 21/04 we get the comparisons below:

Model	Price	Configuration
eMac	$799	17" CRT, 1.25GHz PowerPC G4 256MB DDR333 SDRAM ATI Radeon 9200 32MB DDR 40GB Ultra ATA drive 14W stereo system AppleCombo drive
Dell Dimension 2400	$449	Intel Celeron processor at 2.40GHz 128MB shared DDR SDRAM at 266MHz 17" (16.0"vis) CRT Monitor 40GB Ultra/ATA 100 Hard Drive Integrated Intel Extreme 3D Graphics
iMac	$1,799	17-inch widescreen LCD 1.25GHz PowerPC G4 NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra 64MB DDR video memory 256MB DDR333 SDRAM 80GB Ultra ATA hard drive SuperDrive Apple Pro Speakers AirPort Extreme Ready Bluetooth Option
Dell OptiPlex GX270	$1,759	3.0 Ghz P4/800; 256MB, DDR, non ECC, 333Mhz 80GB EIDE 7200RPM, 8X DVD+RW Dell UltraSharp 1703FP flat panel 64MB, nVidia, GeForce 4MX
G5 Dual	$2,999	Dual 2.5GHz PowerPC G5 1.25GHz frontside bus/processor 512K L2 cache/processor 512MB DDR400 SDRAM Expandable to 8GB SDRAM 160GB Serial ATA 8x SuperDrive Three PCI-X Slots ATI Radeon 9600 XT 128MB DDR video memory 56K internal modem
Dell Precision 670	$4,009	2 x 3.4Ghz Xeon 512MB 160GB SATA, 7200 RPM Hard Drive 8X DVD+RW/+R 128MB PCIe x16 (DVI/VGA) ATI FireGL V3100,

The Macs have built in firewire, airport extreme, and 10/100 ethernet ports along with the OS-X operating system and a bundle of software including ilife (which Apple describe as "office for the rest of your life" - GarageBand, iTunes, iPhoto,iMovie and iDVD) and stuff like AppleWorks, Quicken, and the World Book Encyclopedia.

The PCs come with some variant on Microsoft Windows/XP and varying levels of discount on Microsoft Office. Thus Office Professional costs $359 on the low end Dimension, $319 on the OptiPlex, and isn't offered with the Precision bundle.

Oddly, Office Professional for the Mac includes a PC emulator and the package most comparable to the "Professional" PC edition appears to be called the Standard Edition. It sells at $399 for all Macs.

If we look at these raw cost comparisons carefully it becomes obvious that none of them really work because the Macs are consistently overspec relative to the PCs.

The entry level eMac, for example, costs $350 (78%) more than the PC but the latter is useable only to run Windows 98 and other software carried forward from previous generations. Accept Dell's rather warmly endorsed package of the basic upgrades needed just to run XP comfortably, and the price difference falls to $190 (24%). That's still considerably cheaper than the eMac, but still short stereo, a R/W CD/DVD combo, graphics capabilities, wireless connectivity, and dual firewire ports. Adding everything except firewire brings the price to rough parity but still leaves the PC underspecified relative to the eMac.

The same problems afflict the iMac vs. OptiPlex270 comparison. The base PC is $40 cheaper than the mid range iMac, but the PC lacks the iMac's connectivity and multi-media capabilities. It's possible to add these, but doing so pushes the PC well over the high end of the price range for the iMac.

In this case, furthermore, you should be aware that the PC represents Dell's latest product generation while Apple has just just stopped taking orders for the current iMacs preparatory to introducing the next generation iMacs in September.

The high end comparison shows the result of the underlying difference in functional focus much more clearly. Like the iMacs, Apple's current G5 offering is actually well past its intended replacement date because of IBM's delays in shipping new CPUs, but the basic box is still a full $1,000 bucks cheaper than Dell's newest Xeons.

As usual, however, the PC lacks the Mac's connectivity features. More importantly, my price comparison above omits the monitors for both because the recommended monitors are designed for different jobs and are not remotely comparable. Dell's "UltraSharp 2001FP 20.1-inch Flat Panel LCD Monitor with Height Adjustable Stand" at $899 by itself or $700 if bundled with the Precision 670, is just a monitor.

Apple's cinema displays are more than that. They're intended to function at the core of digital production environments. Thus all three models, from the 20 inch to the 30 inch, have things like DVI and dual firewire ports to enable plug and go video recording or media sharing. In consequence the price ranges from $1,299 to $3,299, or $600 more than Dell wants for the 20 inch unit, but the additional things they do can't be done with the Dell at any price.

The least unfair comparison, therefore is obtained by adding the Dell monitor, as the lowest common denominator, to both machines, thereby penalizing Apple's price by the $199 difference between Dell's stand-alone and package price. Do that and the Mac comes in at $3,898 with the Dell at $4,709 -making the Apple about 20% cheaper despite offering more features.

At the low end, therefore, the PC desktops are marginally cheaper than the Macs if you can do without their connectivity and multi-media capabilities and considerably more expensive if you can't. At the very high end, however, all of the design focus is on multi-media processing and the PCs simply aren't competitive from either hardware or cost perspectives.

Servers

	Price	Configuration
Apple X-Serve	$4,399	2GB, 160GB, 2 x 2Ghz G5, unlimited users; MacOS-X
Dell 2850	$9,370	2GB, 2 x 73GB, 2 x 3.2Ghz Xeon, Windows 2003/XP Server 25 users
Sun V20Z	$5,699	2GB, 2 x 73GB, 2 x Opteron 248, Solaris x86

Note that the Dell 2850 is a brand new machine while the X-serve is at the end of its product cycle with the replacement delayed only because IBM has been slow to deliver the higher speed CPUs.

More importantly, the X-serve is designed for a very different role than the PC. It runs Unix and so can do anything the PC server can, but the design optimizations aim at work the PC is very poorly suited to - streaming out multi-Gigabyte digital imaging files. Thus it has additional connectivity and a matching X-serve RAID array aimed at completing the package needed by digital media developers.

Thge X-serve RAID package uses very large, and individually slow, ATA style drives in parallel to offer cheap ($10,999 for 3.5 TB) bulk storage for large multimedia files that are usually stored and retrieved via serial I/O. For this type of application what counts most are reliability and sustained I/O streaming - requirements that are met very well by a design combining RAID protection with highly parallel ATA.

Dell doesn't offer an X-serve RAID equivelent and the 2850's PC design is not internally well suited to continuous sequential I/O. Instead it's optimized for short, but high speed, I/O bursts of the kind associated with document or database storage and retrieval.

The killer issue, however, on comparing Apple's X-serve to the Dell 2850 is that Apple doesn't charge for client access rights. As a result the Dell 2850, which costs nearly 30% more than the X-serve before software, costs more than twice as much as the X-serve once Microsoft's $3,295 charge for a 25 user license gets counted.

At the server level, therefore, a less unfair comparison would be to the Sun V20Z. Sun's machine, like Apple's, is 64bit capable, has page protection, runs Unix, and provides for full SMP. For roughly similar dual CPU, 2GB units, with Unix Sun wants about $1,250 bucks more than Apple with most of that difference accounted for by Sun's use of UltraSCSI 320 I/O in place of serial ATA.

Interestingly, strip out the OS and Sun's hardware is about $600 cheaper than Dell's - include OS licensing for access by fifty general office users and you can buy both competing servers for the price of one Dell 2850.

Notebooks

	Price	Configuration
Dell 12"	$2,214	Inspiron 700M, 1.6Ghz PM, 256MB, 60GB, Intel Extreme Graphics; XP Professional
Apple 12"	$1,599	Powerbook, 12", 1.33Ghz, 256MB, 60GB; NVIDIA GeForce FX (64MB)
Dell 15"	$2,677	Inspiron 9100, 3.2Ghz P4, 512MB, 80GB , RADEON 9700 (64MB); XP Professional
Apple 15"	$2,499	Powerbook 15", 1.5Ghz, 512MB, 80GB; Radeon 9700 (64MB)

The notebook comparisons are comparatively clean and decisive. Dell's low end Inspiron 5150 ($1,079 after 10% discount) offers a 15 inch display but is otherwise not competitive with Apple's 12 inch iBook ($1,099) and Dell doesn't offer anything to compete with Apple's 17 inch Titaniums ($2,799) at the high end.

In between both Apple's 12 inch and 15 inch powerbooks are cheaper and include more extensive connectivity capabilities than do the PCs.

Summary

So, bottom line, are PCs cheaper than Macs? No, despite what you read in the PC press, it's the other way around: compare Apples to apples, and Macs are cheaper than PCs.