Dell’s $1,304 Premium over Mac Pro
If you’re following along with my blog, you know that I recently came to the conclusion that even Windows developers would be smart to pickup a Mac as their next developer machine. In that article, I made the argument that even if buying a Mac has a $500 premium, it would still be a non-issue and choosing a Mac would be the wiser choice. Taking my own advice, I just upgraded Axosoft Developer machines to Mac Pros, without doing any comparison shopping.
Today, I decided to see how much I would have saved for each developer if I had chosen similar Dell machines. Of course, I wouldn’t have cared what my savings would be, because part of the incentive to buy Mac Pros was to provide our dev team with the flexibility to develop anything for any platform. But to my huge surprise, buying a comparable Dell had a $1,304 premium!!! Take a look for yourself:
As you can see from the images above, the Dell price without tax is $4,153 while Apple’s price is $2,849.
Who is Dell joking here? Now to be fair, there are 2 differences in configurations:
- The Dell System bus is 1,333 Mhz vs. Mac Pro’s 1,600 Mhz bus
- The Dell Memory is 667 Mhz vs. Mac Pro’s 800 Mhz
That’s right! The Mac Pro has even a better configuration and costs $1,300 less. Upgrade pricing was equally insane. While Apple charged $200 for a 2nd 500GB drive, Dell’s price for that same upgrade was $339.
So now taking the Dell premium into consideration, the faster Mac Pro, better style and looks, the easier component access and ability to run OS X, is there any reason to stick with Dell?
Did you factor in your comparison the cost of Apple Care which would extend the warranty to 3 years, as with the Dell offering?
Alexis, you are right, I did miss the 3-years of warranty. That adds $249 to the price of the Mac Pro, making the difference closer to $1050. However, the 800 Mhz memory and 1600 Mhz bus upgrades on the Dell add far more to the Dell price.
As a .NET developer, I was wondering did you add in the Virtual Machine and Vista OS for each developer so that they can still do their development in a Windows-based .NET world (or at least their testing)?
Ugh. I priced a dell refurb machine for about $2000 less than the Mac Pro.
Thom, as a .net developer, you should have an MSDN subscription which gets you licenses to all MS OSes, VM, etc. for that developer. In fact, the Dell including a Vista license is a complete waste for most developers because most MS developers already own appropriate licenses, yet they are forced to pay for it again with the purchase of a new machine.
John, are you suggesting you purchased a comparable system for $850 ($2,000 less than Mac Pro)? If so, you should share the details so we may all benefit.
Maybe my developers are deprived, but I’ve never spent $2,850 for a developer’s machine. Admittedly, none of them have ever had the opportunity to work on a machine with dual quad-core procs or a 500GB hard drive. More horsepower is always better, but my developers have no need for 500GB worth of storage. Most of my developers prefer notebooks. For example, the last dev machine I bought was a Lattitude D630, with a single Core 2 Duo T7500, 2.20GHz proc, 2GB of RAM, an 80GB hard drive, a port replicator, premium support for 3yrs, and a 9-cell upgraded battery. I paid $1,454.95 plus tax. It’s not equivalent in terms of horse power, but I’m not hearing any complaints either.
So why doesn’t OnTime run on a Mac?
To add to #9, add mono (http://www.mono-project.com/) to the discussion (runs .net on a Mac).
Well those Mac Pro systems aren’t 3k anymore….they are now $4600 starting. I wish they did keep the price down:( A couple things to point out in your quote however is the level of warranty given for the dell vs the mac and the graphics card difference.
The dell warranty for the precision line up is pretty nice. Next day repair on site with parts in hand. I have used it before and it was very convenient. The apple warranty is a little unclear about the on-site options. It says it may service it on-site.
The graphics card is a quadro which are much more expensive than just regular consumer cards. Overall I have to agree with Darrin. We are still using plain old tyan pedestal workstations with a 939 dual core amd processors at 2ghz which were built for about 1k each.