Vista

All the components are there, how much do Apple pay there Chinese workers an hour to bolt it all together and stick in a mirrored hard drive?

No. That's missing the point of the machine.

'That's crap', I hear you cry.... but that, again, would be missing the point of the machine.

Not on a CD, no.

Download from iTunes, plug in my iPod / iPhone and it's job done.

Shock horror phone needs cable to work with PC. That's a bit like saying Macs are useless because there desktops need a cable plugged in to power them.

It's the same as the Dell Adamo, except that the Mac is cheaper and weighs less. Not having an internal optical drive is common to both Macs and PCs. Only a f****it would try to make an issue of it.

If you want a Mac with an internal optical drive, you buy one with an internal optical drive.

And they're full of sharp edges and a bastard to take to pieces compared to a Mac Pro.

KK531EA - admittedly yes, single socket, but a W3520 the same CPU as the basic mac pro. 4x PCI express slots. That was the model the above costing was based on. The W3520 is not a multiprocessor enabled CPU so yes, apple has a second socket but is unlikely (or is out of spec) to take a second W3520. Which is nice, as it means you spent all that money to not be able to add a second CPU. Wouldn't surprise me

Z600 is dual socket and is hard to compare, but I'll give it a go.

Z600, 6 gig RAM, 500 GB HD, 2x E5530 2.4GHZ £3011, plus vid card at £50 and monitor at £320.

Mac Pro 8 core, 2.26ghz is cheaper and has a 640 gig HD at £2499. But to get faster - 2.66ghz is £1120 more at £3619 Then add that £635 monitor again.

Except we're comparing Apple with HP, if you're gonna mix and match then 200 quid gets a monitor.

You really are as thick as your spelling suggests.....

No other manufacturer other than...

Sony. Toshiba. Lenovo. And they manage to get card slots, optical drives and

On Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:34:26 +0100, AstraVanMann spouted forth:

Yes, it was TIME. I worked there back in 1996. Not many people who worked there purchased a PC from work despite a 40% discount. They were truly, truly s**te.

Mike P

It doesn't.

I run for weeks at a time without rebooting - which I only do when I go away overnight - so this machine has been on for around 14 days now. Before that, it had passed 30 days uptime, whilst simulaneously running XP Pro under VMWare.

Haven't tried an uptime on the G4 iBook in the office - but I set it up around 4 months back and haven't had to restart it since.

I used to run a home webserver / file server / download machine which reached 6+ months uptime before I decided I really should do an OS / iTunes update, requiring a reboot.

My current Vista media box needs a reboot every week, or it does funny stuff, including ramping up the fans to silly speeds whilst sitting there on idle.

And they're all twice as thick.

When an Apple breaks down most people buy a new one. They do you know.

Client of mine dropped a 17" mac book pro thingy about 8 inches to the floor, insurance company happily wrote it off when we added the cost of a replacement top and bottom case section to the labour required to fix it.

I fail to see why a Bluetooth phone and Bluetooth computer need cables to sync them.

OSX will sync with a vast majority of phones over BT, without any additional software.

'Expensive goods cost lots to fix if you break them, non-shocker'

This is getting crazy, the depths to which Wintel fanbois will go in order to justify their following of the sheep in using an inferior OS and platform.....

There's plenty. I'm comparing non consumer cheap tat type PCs with Apples because I understand that Apple users like the build quality and reliability.

Let me retort with this: Asus EEE top all in one 15.4". There's not an apple in that form factor. Price about £500. EEE box, £250. There's not an Apple in that form factor, either.

Well, the eee box and eee top follow the Mini and iMac form factors, but are cheap Atom based systems - with tiny hard drives, limited memory, and sluggish processors (My Air running a VM Ware install of Windows using a single core runs faster than my Aspire running full-tilt).

Apple Macbook Air 1.86ghz 2gig 128ssd £1771, 19.4mm thick, 325mm wide, 227mm deep, 1.36kg Tosh R600, £1954 (yes it's dearer), 1.4ghz, 128ssd, 3 gig ram, 1.114kg with a DVD writer built in, 0.773 without (and £115 less). Has HSDPA. And is

"portable device not designed to take simple damage"

Was shocked to find when I stripped it out as well that the hard drive wasn't mounted in shock mounts. It was fine though, the damage was cosmetic (though the CD slot was bent so unusable). If I get hold of the carcass I'll beat the slot back into shape and have it to replace my G3 - I'll have to upgrade logic though...

More expensive, (significantly) slower, heavier.

So, we have come to the conclusion that you can't find exact matching specs., but once you start to spec up Windows machines from 'premium' manufacturers vs. Apple machines, there is little, or nothing, between the prices.