Home PC Market: A Tale of Two Desktops

Apple iMac vs Dell XPS 8900 Desktop

During the Christmas season I was tasked by my parents to find them a new PC to replace their aging Dell desktop computer.  For the longest time I've wanted them to upgrade to a Mac so they can enjoy the ease of use and relatively malware free operating system.

It was a great time to buy a new computer as there were many sales going on at the time and as rare as it was to ever see an Apple based desktop on sale, Best Buy had the low end iMac featured with a $200 discount.

I researched the specs and although it was on the lower-end side of things it looked like more than enough computer for them since they mostly worked with Office applications, photo management and web browsing.  They were excited to join the Apple camp as I explained them it came with a beautiful 21.5" display (even the non-Retina version is great looking) and an integrated webcam (so they can FaceTime Rob from overseas).  Personally I was looking forward to setting up a relatively cable-free compute for them as they have a rats nets accumulation of cables connected to all their peripherals.

My brief joy turned to sadness when I read multiple reviews of this model that stated the one true bottleneck of this model iMac was the glacier performance of the 5400 RPM SATA hard drive.  This could be overcome if you did a custom configuration replacing it with a speedier Fusion or SSD drive, however this would add hundreds of dollars and wouldn't qualify for the BestBuy $200 discount, driving the price up even more.  Also I did not want to do major surgery and potentially void the warranty just to upgrade the hard drive after the fact.

Costco ended up having a sale on a newer Dell XPS 8900 desktop and after comparing the specifications I reluctantly conceded that this was the better deal.  It didn't have a built in display but the CPU/graphics/memory and hard drive were superior to the iMac.  Also I could easily replace the internal components at a later date with relatively ease.

My parents did end up getting the Dell and it was probably for the best as my mom uses a special property management software that only works on Windows.  My only struggle was giving them a tutorial on Windows 10 since they were previous Windows Vista users (oh the horror!).

Creative Pro Market: A Tale of Two Notebooks

Apple MacBook Pro and the Dell XPS 15

As mentioned on Twitter, I recently made a quick comparison of two professional notebooks - the 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro and the Dell XPS 15 (9560).

Both of these configurations are best-value offerings, neither entry-level nor at the high-end in terms of price and features. Basically a machine to consider as an upgrade to my 2011 MacBook Air after Modo recently struggled with some print-sized resolution renders.

From a hardware perspective, Apple isn't making a great argument to stay in the fold. Dell currently offers the latest generation Intel CPU's and Nvidia GPU's, a higher resolution touch display and double the storage. All for $500 less. Ouch. The difference is even more dramatic when you increase the specs on the MacBook to match it closer to the Dell. Other long-time Mac users are running the numbers and coming to the same conclusion too.

The Good: The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050. This Pascal-based GPU should dramatically improve OpenGL performance inside of Modo as well as most games that I'm interested in playing such as Inside, No Man's Sky, The Witness, Firewatch, Obduction, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Doom. After being in the Mac camp for so long, I'm pleasantly surprised to discover that the XPS can easily be opened up and have the RAM, the wireless networking card and the SSD be replaced.

The Bad: Build quality and design. The fingerprint reader looks hastily tacked on and this reviewer showed how his XPS wobbled when placed on a flat surface. I didn't realize until recently that every PC-based trackpad has historically been inferior to the MacBook and Microsoft is attempting to remedy this with their Windows Precision Touchpad initiative. This feature is on the XPS, which improves performance, but it's still not equal to the MacBook. The placement of the webcam at the bottom of the screen, the placement of the speakers underneath the machine and the short keyboard travel while typing are all less than optimal.

The Ugly: Windows. The user interface feels disjointed to me as if random interface ideas were bolted on together by separate design teams at various times during its development. To Microsoft's credit, Windows 10 looks to be a big improvement over 8.1 in regards to UI. However, high DPI scaling is still broken for legacy apps and for those with multiple monitor configurations.

What I'll miss most if I switch: MacOS. It looks and feels like a well-thought-out, precision engineered machine. Typography, icons and folders are aesthetically designed and well-proportioned. Tons of useful utilities are integrated throughout the system. Quick Look to instantly preview multiple file formats including OBJ. Batch file renaming with options to format-add-replace. Automator actions. Not to mention the feature-rich Xcode IDE for Swift development. Sigh.

Time to focus on the "Creative Pro" market again Tim.