Apple Dual 2-GHz Power Mac G5 is Less Expensive than a Comparably Performing Dual 3.06 Xeon Dell 650 Workstation

This is BIG news! The Mac's G5 has 2/3'ds the clock speed yet PC Magazine compared the two and concluded that they are comparable in performance. What PC Magazine did not write was that the Power Mac G5 is much less expensive than the Dell Workstation. Worse, PC Magazine claimed that the two were comparable in price. This is simply not true, significantly not true, as we pointed out in our Tuesday article.

In an exchange of emails with a Macs Only! reader, Ziff-Davis executives, publishers of PC Magazine, defended their statement and revised the article to include more details about the Dell 650 Workstation but inexplicably did not revise the erroneous description "similarly priced". We revisited the Dell web site and configured it using the newly divulged details and got $5,213 for the Dell instead of $5,884. However, if we revise the Power Mac G5 configuration to be consistent with the Dell (mainly 4 512-MB DIMMS rather than 2 1-GB DIMMS and add 3-yr AppleCare), the price of the G5 is only $3,887. That is a very significant $1,326 less than the comparably performing Dell not "similar" in anybody's lexicon.

But the real story is not PC Magazine's journalistic ethics. It is the fact that Apple's top-of-the-line dual 2-GHz Power Mac G5 performs as well as a dual 3.06 GHz Xeon Dell 650 Workstation but costs less, significantly less.