“Almost every time someone discusses Apple’s pricing, it is assumed that you can buy similar products from other companies for less. From the release of the very first Mac, you supposedly had to pay more money to go Apple,” Gene Steinberg reports for The Tech Night Owl. “Indeed, Apple was often attacked for daring to charge extra for Macs and other gear.”
“Now when it comes to the high-end Mac Pro, as soon as the 2013 model with its striking tubular looks shipped, you can bet that the critics were busy trying to see if a workstation that started at $2,999 for a fairly basic configuration, and came close to $9,600 fully outfitted, was indeed a good value compared to the competition,” Steinberg reports. “What is clear from the starting gate is that it’s extremely difficult to actually find anything with comparable specs in any workstation from a mainstream manufacturer, such as Dell or HP. I checked the business section at Dell’s site and tried to match the component complement, roughly speaking, of the most expensive Mac Pro with a Precision Workstation. I couldn’t come close regardless of what I did.”
“My next attempt was to build a customized HP Z820 workstation. The price hit $11,581 before I gave up without getting all the components in place,” Steinberg reports. “This appears to explain why others have tried the build-it-yourself route, using parts from different PC dealers to see if they could make one.”
Read more in the full article here.