Apple’s $5K iMac Pro Is a Great Deal vs Comparable Windows PCs

Apple is widely known for offering premium products that tend to be more on the pricey side. And while the quality of the Cupertino-company’s products — including the iMac, iPhone, and MacBook Pro, for example — are essentially second-to-none, there’s no doubt you can usually score a much, much better deal if you were to settle for a similarly-spec’d Windows PC.

While that may very well be the case, however, some PC-makers (including Microsoft, itself) have proven in recent years that their ‘Mac-killer’ models can actually get quite pricey — if not outright unaffordable — for the average user, and that’s notwithstanding the fact the macOS is an all-around better, more intuitive, fluid, accessible, and creative-minded operating system than Windows 10 will likely ever be.

Take Apple’s recently-announced iMac Pro, for example, which was unveiled earlier this week at WWDC and should be available to customers sometime in December of this year. With its whopping price tag of $4,999, Apple’s first-ever Pro-grade iMac sent the social media world into a tizzy this week, with some arguing, perhaps understandably, that $5,000 for a personal computer is just way too much money.

And while these same bargain-hunters might be quick to point out how similarly-styled windows PCs, such as HP’s ultra-stylish 27-inch ENVY all-in-one, for example, are considerably less expensive (a fraction of the price!) of Apple’s base-model iMac Pro, Imgur user “squaruss” pointed out in a comparison posted to his account this week that the $5K iMac Pro (specification wise) is actually less expensive than a myriad of similarly-spec’d offerings from “boutique” PC-makers.

iMac Pro vs. Lenovo Workstation

Specification wise, what we know so far about Apple’s base-model iMac Pro is that it will boast the following: an 8-core Intel Xeon processor clocked at an undisclosed speed, four Thunderbolt 3 ports, four USB 3 ports, a single 10-Gig Ethernet port, 1TB of SSD storage, 32 GB of blazingly-fast 2666 MHz ECC RAM, and yet-to-be-released Vega graphics — all bundled up in Apple’s slim and sleek, aluminum unibody design, and complemented by a massive 27-inch 5K retina display.

In comparison, the custom-built Lenovo Workstation outlined in squaruss’ comparison boasts the following: an 8-core Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4 processor, a P910 motherboard with two Thunderbolt 3 ports, 32 GB of 2400 MHz ECC RAM, a Nvidia Quadro M5000 GPU, and two 512GB PCI-E SSD storage drives.

Most notably, the Lenovo configuration specified above, according to the post, would cost just shy of $6,000, with an additional $599.30 in ‘instant savings’ (which is presumed to be for a limited time only), bringing the grand total for the Windows 10-powered PC to $5,393.70.

Worth noting is how at that price, the Lenovo model doesn’t even include a display — let alone an eye-popping 5K display like Apple’s iMac Pro. Squaruss went ahead and did the math for us, though, coupling the system with one of DELL’s 27-inch UP2715K Widescreen 5K monitors, which in itself will run you an additional $1,969.99 — enough to buy yourself an additional base-model 5K iMac, and bringing the total cost to around $7,360.

And if you were thinking that maybe you’d be able to configure a white box, custom gaming PC rig for much less than that — think again, according to AppleInsider, who scoured the web and found a variety of comparable “boutique” PCs boasting similar configurations, which ranged in price from $5,225 to over $8,250, depending on the model.

Now the iMac Pro doesn’t seem like such a bad deal after all, does it? What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments.