royalcrown :
Don't forget to buy a motherboard at newegg with thunderbolt, because Imac has it. Tou just dropped 269 - 369 on a motherboard then. Also the CPUS IMAC uses are desktop and not mobile. 289 at newegg.
I agree that its easy to build a faster cheaper computer than an imac, what I am saying is it's not as cheap to build a computer that is as fast as the imac AND that has THUNDERBOLT, 768GB of SSD storage...while being virtually silent until you game and then still being quieter than most pcs.
The SSDs and the fact I wanted mine as quiet as my old imac are what made it cost 3200 at newegg. My Imac Also came out 3,249.00 so I spent more than you somehow, prob the I7 vs the I5. IS the I7 best bang for the buck nope, but I play BF3 and it likes hyperthreading.
Fair enough on the noise issue. I'm not saying you were wrong to buy an iMac; I just don't think it's a good value proposition for the general user.
FWIW, I did select the i7 in the Apple Store, but I didn't select the SSD because the price seemed too high -- +$900 over the default HDD. Because I wanted to try to be fair, instead of simply selecting all of the most expensive options for the sake of making the Mac look expensive, I selected the 1TB Fusion Drive instead (which was AFAIK +$200 over the default option).
Depending on when you bought your SSDs (for the PC), you could easily have eaten up even a fairly massive budget on storage alone. But I can only evaluate the question based on what I know
today. And today, SSDs can be found for around $1/GB (give or take). By that standard, $900+ for a ~760GB SSD isn't a flat-out preposterous number, but once again we're back to the Mac's main weakness -- the lack of flexibility. What if I don't want an SSD that large? What if I don't want a 27" monitor, for that matter? What if I'd like to use a desktop-class GPU without buying a workstation? What if I don't care about Thunderbolt?
The problem is as much philosophical as it is economic; the general PC enthusiast looks at the price tag for the iMac and automatically thinks of it in terms of an analogous (performance-wise) PC that might suit him -- perhaps a smaller or slightly-less-than-grade-A-brand-name screen, a GTX 660 Ti, a mid-tier CPU (i5 or low-end i7), a good sized SSD (say, 240 GB or even 500ish), and so on. That PC configuration would likely cost $1,200-$1,500. You're probably right when you say that such a PC wouldn't be
as nice as the ~$2700 iMac, but you sure are paying through the nose for the iMac's intangible advantages. For you, the price premium may be worthwhile, but the general PC enthusiast is going to look at some of the QoL advantages you've bought with your iMac and go, "
That's worth an extra $1,000+?"
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