Also I beg you to reconsider building a custom pc over an iMac. It is easy to build a higher performance machine for the same money or less, BUT it is IMPOSSIBLE to build a higher quality computer for the double the money. A screen that amazing would cost you over $500 by itself. You get i5 quad core, 4GB of ram, 500GB HD, Aluminum Keyboard ($70), Magic Mouse ($70), HD Facetime camera ($100), and thunderbolt ports. That leaves about $350 for a motherboard with thunderbolt, i5 quad, harddrive, videocard (512mb DDR5), RAM, power supply, and a case.
Sorry, but this is nonsense. Please be rational when making absolute statements.
The Mac hardware is built at the same facility, by the same people who build Dell and HP computers. It is using the same off-the-shelf parts all of the other brands are using.
The only difference is the case.
Only the iPhones use limited (but not exclusive) and pre-selected hardware parts for production (so they are getting limited amounts of preselected "working" hardware and when it works they order the "big stock").
The 4GB of RAM used in the iMac costs $25 (8GB cost $45) and the 500GB HD costs $45-50 dollars (a 1TB costs $80-90). The motherboard is a $125 one. The graphics card used is $120. The processor is $200. A Razer Copperhead with their (bought as accessory) mouse pad is lightyears ahead of anything Apple ever sold (and much more suitable for long editing sessions) and a keyboard, well, pick your pick. Power in that case is $50 dollars. Do the math.
And when you work with Kontakt (which Fataltone is planning to do), even 8GB of RAM will be barely enough (throw in some other VSTis and effects, save your HD lifetime by running the WAVs in the track in RAM, the DAW and the OS itself) and recording/streaming from/storage/system HD on a 500GB or even 1 or 2TB 7200rpm? No sir, that's absolutely not enough. Not that you can't run sessions on that, but you don't want to bottleneck (especially when it comes to mixing a lot of tracks/streaming libraries (see Kontakt)/using timebased effects/pre-rendering of FX (which most DAWs these days are doing)).
This comes from someone who owns and runs a multi-room recording facility, which up 'til last year was running Macs (I think we had 8 Pro Tools HD stations and a couple of iMacs in the office/lounge). Never again. They got worse and worse over time.
So I'm not speaking from the standpoint of someone who had a great machine, or had a mix of bad and good ones, they got worse and worse over time. My father owned a printing house in the 90s. All run on Macs. Back then extremely expensive, but perfectly built machines. I have a 2000 G4 450MHz MP in my garage that I could still fire up and it works perfectly. I just don't trust Apple anymore.
Don't get me wrong. Beautifully designed cases, awesome marketing, decently running OS, but it's simply not worth it anymore.
Btw, in case you buy a Mac/"brand" PC, you get a guarantee for a set amount of time. You can extend it for a hefty price. But what most don't know is that when you buy parts and put the computer together, then the guarantee of the INDIVIDUAL parts counts. And in most cases the guarantee is 3-5, 10 years and for some parts even an indefinite one. If you pay $75 to a computer company for putting the machine together for you, then they ALSO have to give you a guarantee on the machine working. So you are basically losing guarantee service time when buying from a "brand".
Just my 2c
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