Home PC Market: A Tale of Two Desktops
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!).
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| Apple iMac vs Dell XPS 8900 Desktop |
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!).
posted by Marcos at March 19, 2017
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