The Saint said:
And with the exception of the Mac Pro, high-end PCs simply pack stiffer specs than any Mac, from a full Gb more RAM to higher-powered video cards to the new dedicated physics processor from AGEIA, which not even the Mac Pro offers.
You can get a physics proc for the Mac Pro - PCIx I believe.
"Hopefully we'll see this for the Mac", although I don't see any reason why they couldn't port it over.
If you buy an iMac looking for a high end workstation, yeah, you'll be left wanting. That's what the Mac Pro is for, and since it can triple boot OS X, Windows (Vista even), and Linux, you can make it whatever you want it to be.
In the end, build it yourself PCs will always have an advantage over Macs because you can put whatever the fuck you want in it, but Macs will always have the advantage of an OS specifically written for the hardware. PCs will never have integrated OS/hardware solutions like Target Disk Mode, Open Firmware (BIOS comes close, but not quite), Single User Mode, out of the box (or freeware app) cloning, standardized driver sets (extract an HD from a G3 iMac and install it in a G5 tower and it will boot)... etc. Here's a typical Mac backup scheme: Clone to an external FW drive. Done. Your internal drive fails, you boot to your clone and keep working. When your new drive replaces the failed drive, you clone back from FW and keep working. You could have taken the clone home and booted to that volume on any other Mac and kept working.
As a technology consultant that has to troubleshoot issues on both PCs and Macs, I appreciate very, very much the steps Apple has taken to make troubleshooting their machines easy. You can split/half search a Mac in less than ten minutes, PCs on the other hand are a quagmire of madness. You want to take an item out of the startup loop? Head to /Library/StartupItems/ and remove the file. You want to do the same on a PC? Delete the app, search through the registry, search through the msconfig panel, reboot, make sure it took, reconfig, blah blah blah.
Hardware/Software integration is the core strength of the Mac. That in and of itself creates possibilities that PCs can't compete with. Inversely, Hardware/Software independence it a strength that Macs can't compete with - you can build a badass machine for $400. So in the end - it's just what you prefer, which is where I think we left the last Macs vs. PCs thread.