This is just a comparison of hardware and prices current as of today, Tuesday, 27 January 2009. I’ll leave the discussion of software up to other people (of course, I have my own opinion, and it shouldn’t be that hard to find out what it is). This is a test of the educational pricing from Dell and the standard pricing from Apple. That’s just the way it works; while we get an educational discount from both vendors, I do not see the educational price from Apple.

These are the cost and specification breakdowns for a high-end desktop workstation from Dell and Apple. I tried to get the specs as close as I could. The glaring difference is in the video cards; I have no idea which one would be better, but they are both 256MB. I left the memory and hard drives small, and did not spec a monitor, as most users will add their own after purchase.