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I'm always intrigued by these claims that you can get something basically the same as a Mac for much cheaper. When I've investigated in the past (but in the OS X era---it seems generally accepted that Macs were sold at a hefty premium in the 80s and 90s), I've generally found the price difference to by in the ~10% neighborhood. I just priced out a grossly-similar laptop to the Macbook Pro Retina at Dell's website, and came up with a Latitude E6520 with a price of $1931. Less than a Macbook Pro Retina by about 15%. The Latitude has a slightly faster processor, a graphics chip with half as much video memory, no retina display, weighs ~1.5 lbs more, and (I suspect) lacks Apple's all-around build quality. However, a System 76 laptop with similar specs as the MBPR costs $1153. But that's with only the Intel HD 4000 graphics (no NVIDIA chip), and, again, no retina display. So, I don't know. Can anyone offer some insight into why the System 76 system is so inexpensive compared to the base-model MBPR and the Latitude above? I know that Dell sells, for instance, Inspirons, which are much cheaper than Latitudes, but my understanding is that these machines are essentially composed of whatever components can be bought most cheaply this week, and so they pose maintenance headaches, because it may be difficult to obtain a component that dies a year after purchase. Also, my personal experience with Inspirons is that they have very poor build quality. |