Buying a Mac as a Windows PC

Stan Beer
Thursday, 24 August 2006 17:21

Opinion and Analysis

Like many of the media around the world, I was treated to a comprehensive demo by the local Apple Mac marketing team, who showed off the Mac Pro, the last of the company's computer hardware to move to the Intel platform.

There really isn't much more to add to the myriad of comments that have already been made about the Mac Pro. From the outside it looks like its predecessor the Power Mac G5 Quad.

However, remove the side panel and the difference between the far more power efficient and higher performing twin Intel dual-core Xeon processors and previous G5 system is stark.

Less fans because of a more power efficient system means more room for everything - expansion slots galore, 4 drive bays for up to 2 Terabytes of storage, up to 16 Gbytes of memory and ports for everything and anything on both the front and back of the box. A visit to the Apple site will give you all the details.

However, what interested me the most was not how high this thing could be configured. I was looking at the base system, which with two dual-core Xeon processors clocked at 2.66 GHz, 1GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT graphics card with 256 MB, 250GB hard drive and 16x DVD RW is not too bad at all for A$3999, considering the speed of this puppy.

In fact, as many commentators have already pointed out, the Mac Pro compares favourably in price with similarly configured name brand PCs including systems from Dell and HP.

Leaving aside the benefits and features of having a box that comes with Mac OSX Tiger, soon to be upgraded to Leopard, with all the plug and play features, the Mac Pro still becomes a fairly interesting proposition when considered just as a Windows box.

In fact, the same thing now goes for the entire Mac range, including the iMacs, as well as the MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks. They're all pretty well priced for their configurations and certainly comparable to their Dell and other name brand counterparts.

There are some commentators out in the marketplace that still maintain that the Mac will stay just a niche player. They may not have looked at the prices lately compared to the Windows only boxes.