It's also about 90% of the market. Macs have a significant share of this market -- sold to those who care more about design, stability and/or status more than price.
$800 should get you an i5 2500K, a solid motherboard, 16 gigs of RAM, a small SSD, a nice case & PS. No ECC, but it's considerably faster than a Mac Pro.
For the 1500 machine, add a killer graphics card, a secondary HDD and a Windows license. You'll even have some money left over to sub in one of those silly "gamer" cases.
That's BYO. Prebuilt stuff is generally about the same price, but comes with lower quality cases, power supplies & motherboards.
The fact that people buy a high performance item for a low performance task does not make the item over priced it means they are over paying for what they need. There is a big difference.
Again, posting what you should be able to get is all fine but if you're comparing to a mac pro then until you post me a parts list for a workstation with the same quality of parts put together already then you're not really making your point.
You're not going to do that though because its time consuming and difficult to match up. Also you're ignoring the cost involved in the effort of finding/getting and assembling those parts. To be a fair comparison you'd have to go off one of the PC manufactures lists or at least add overhead for the labor.
But my point is that matching specs is the wrong thing to do. I want a machine that will compile a large code base really quickly. I can do that for $800, and it will do it faster than any machine that Apple sells for less than $4800. (12 core mac pro with SSD). The $2500 Mac Pro is better than my $800 machine at many things, but my $800 machine is superior for my needs, and that's all that matters.
Then you're arguing against something I didn't claim. I never claimed Macs were the same price as the best PCs for specific tasks. I said that a comparable PC will cost a similar price to a mac. Just because your $800 PC does what you need better does not make it a better machine. It just makes it a better machine for you.
I'm not saying that your claim is wrong, I'm just saying that your claim is meaningless. What's inside the machine doesn't matter at all, the suitability of the machine for the tasks performed on it is what matters.
It's also about 90% of the market. Macs have a significant share of this market -- sold to those who care more about design, stability and/or status more than price.
$800 should get you an i5 2500K, a solid motherboard, 16 gigs of RAM, a small SSD, a nice case & PS. No ECC, but it's considerably faster than a Mac Pro.
For the 1500 machine, add a killer graphics card, a secondary HDD and a Windows license. You'll even have some money left over to sub in one of those silly "gamer" cases.
That's BYO. Prebuilt stuff is generally about the same price, but comes with lower quality cases, power supplies & motherboards.