Yeah, well if you can back up what you are saying then do it. I am not flaming but simply disagreeing with you. I never said they are capped at 3Ghz, I said pushing clock speeds past the 3Ghz mark has serious over heating issues, which is why if you want to OC you got to invest in after market (aka not supported by the manufacturer) cooling. If clock speed were the end all be all, they would be focusing on faster clock speeds instead of multiple cores, multiple memory controllers, more cache, and more built in instruction sets. Since pumping pu the clock speed that high tends to have over heating issues on a generalization, the processor companies took a different route. You don't see a stock Intel or AMD come out of the box clocked at 5Ghz. When they started pushing the 3Ghz spectrum they ran into lots of over heating issues, and found that processors lasted a lot shorter in their life span.
You can design parts, choose what specs and what goes where and have them built. Not every company manufactures parts, only a hand full do. When I say Apple designs them, I mean that literally. They actually design them, then whoever makes them (LG in a lot of cases) makes them with their design. They aren't just sending specs to a company and saying, here whip something up for us. When you take apart an iMac you typically see the silk screen stamp of the company that manufactured the part. I can tell you from my work experience Hitachi and LG manufacture parts for pretty much every major company. They don't sit there and design the part for every company, they manufacture them based on the designs they are sent, with the specs specified by the company.
You have yet to counter my main points. I said spec for spec and feature for feature Apple computers are competitively priced. You simply said you could do this or you know for a FACT that I am wrong, yet you haven't cited any references or even attempted to discredit what I stated.
ECC RAM is ungodly expensive, especially when you buy it at high end spec. There are several levels of ECC RAM.
The fact that you think the i7 is on par with the Xeon tells me you don't grasp the differences in the products. Also, if that were true, then why in the hell would Intel still market and try to sell the Xeon at such a higher price?
The bottom line is, when it comes price for price versus pound for pound, Apple makes a product that is very competitive. I built my last PC last year and it cost me around 1100ish out of my pocket for everything, including a new 22" monitor. Sure, it was slightly better hardware spec wise than an iMac, but I did not have all the features an iMac has standard. Plus my desktop is not an all-in-one.
Computers these days are not just about hardware specs, they are also about features and benefits you get from the product.
