by Matt Del Campo

Created on: January 18, 2009

First off, I would like to mention that I own both a 20" Intel iMac, and a self-built gaming PC. The iMac cost $1500, and the PC cost $800. Next I would like to say that I am a pretty advanced, but young user, who despite having a job, does not have much money.

Taking into consideration how much money I have and/or generate, I must say that PC is the way to go. Any brand-name PC can be opened up, and the parts replaced with your own by hand. OEM parts are significantly cheaper than having them put in by Dell, or HP. If you play your cards right, all your documents and files will remain platform agnostic as well. You can choose the operating system, be it free Linux, Windows, or Pirated Mac OS. The choices are all yours, and as long as the standards don't go out of date, you can upgrade at any time and on your own.

With the Mac, everything is sealed out of the factory, and unchangable once you've paid that enormous premium for the cheap components. You can't upgrade components as they get out of date, and you have to consider software, because Microsoft Windows doesn't come with your computer, so that's $100-200 more before the price of any actual software you may need. Many of the Documents/files associated with Apple software are also very closed or specific; only usable/editable on other Macs, whereas on a PC, a .doc is a .doc, is a .doc but on a Mac, a .page is only openable by Pages, and has no open-source alternatives. If you can afford to stay with a Mac for the rest of your life to keep all your Mac-specific software, Mac-specific files, and your Mac-specific hardware then that would be the bet-

I'm done beating around the bush. Even if you did have the money, a PC would be the better long-term investment. Argue all you want about usability and looks, as I'll agree with the Macheads there. So I pose this one question to the Mac side. What do you do when your Mac starts getting older/slower? Buy a new one. That's a very poor investment, considering you can't even gut it for parts to use in a new computer, which is the major saving grace of the PC. Not the reliability, but instead the flexibility.

One example of this is let's say...a PCI sound card. Your current PC has no integrated sound, for some reason. You invested $100 into it back in 2003, for that new-fangled 5.1 surround sound goodness. You used it for a good while, but that P4 CPU is starting to age, and DDR1 is out, so you decide to spend another $800 to build a PC. We don't need to get into details, because the point is you don't need to spend another $100 on that sound card. It still works. A Mac GPU can't be removed or upgraded. Don't get me started on the prices of Mac GPUs. Ok. You got me started. I personally paid $80 for an nVidia 8800GS last year, then my rich friend just recently (Last month) got an aluminum iMac with that same GPU. For $150. Neither TigerDirect, Newegg or even Amazon will sell that GPU it was such a flop!

Who got the best value? Don't forget the fact that I was just able to put in a new 9800GTX+ for $150 to his 8800GS for $150.

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