Originally posted by crf529 Depends if it's bought off the shelf or built by yourself. OTS pricing will be similar if not more than a Mac, but custom, a PC with the same specs will cost about half as much.
For some definitions of "the same specs"
Try this exercise with the Mac Pro, for instance. Most of the time when people post their "homebuilt Mac Pro Killers" they aren't really comparable machines. You will have trouble finding a workstation board like the one in the Mac Pro, of course - it's custom built. And they use cheap $30 cases - a comparable case to the one used in the Mac Pro is $300+ (coolermaster, etc) But use server motherboard ,chips (Xeons), RAM (fully buffered ECC), and the same quality of case and parts, and you're realizing that the Mac Pro must be a loss leader, despite its high price tag. The Dell Precisions don't even try to compete anymore. My CA 2006 Mac pro is still a useful machine, with four 3Ghz Xeon cores and 16 GB of RAM; it's performance is 10% behind the newest quad core iMacs and 15-20% behind the newest quad-core Mac Pro available. Hard to do that five-year useful life with generic PC components.
Furthermore, you can't "home-build" a competitor for the iMac or the Mac Mini. It's not by accident that Apple builds machines that have no direct PC counterpart except "me-too" machines like the tiny Chinese jobs that pretend to be Mac Minis, or the Gateway and HP iMac ripoffs.
Third party monitors that are as good as Cinema Displays usually cost as much or more, also.