pic: Team 228's Stack 'O Macs

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by Borisdamole

i wouldn't think it would make the CAD team very happy... considering how much more performance per dollar you could get off a PC....

Not wanting to start another flame war thread here, but our team made the decision the same way we make any other business decision. Break down the problem into parts, evaluate each, then find the best possible solution.

Many of our students and mentors have always used Macs. We like them. The iMacs take up very little space, and since we work in the school's wood shop (and thus must store our team computers in a closet between meetings) the space savings and ease of setting them up/putting them away during meetings saves a lot of time.

The separate tower and monitor typical of custom-built PCs typically adds an additional two minutes per computer to set up at a meeting (which is what we've been doing for years with a 2002-vintage Compaq PC owned by our team). 3 computers x 2 minutes x 2 (for setup and tear down) x 60 meetings per year x 5 years = 3600 minutes or 60 hours wasted carrying towers/monitors and plugging in cables.

Also, with the announcement of the ability to use Maya, we only need Windows for three things: Solidworks, programming the FRC robot, and programming Vex robots. In OSX, we'll now use Maya, academic Adobe CS4 Suite, academic Final Cut Studio, and use iPhoto to organize our team's 80+ Gb of team pictures from over the years. And because we bought Macs, we can do all this on the same computer.

Besides, using general prices from Newegg for basically idential hardware to what was shipped in our iMacs we get:

$40 for case
$250 for decent motherboard
$80 for decent power supply
$100 for 4Gb of DDR3 RAM
$100 for 1Tb HDD
$400 for 27" LCD Monitor (practically a necessity for Solidworks or Final Cut)
$250 for Intel i5 Quad Core Processor
$130 for decent video card
$30 for DVD/CD Burner
$20 for SDHC Card Reader
$50 for Wireless N PCI card
$30 for USB Bluetooth dongle
$50 for decent keyboard
$25 for decent mouse
$175 for Windows 7 Ultimate OEM

Grand total: $1730, which is pretty much the price we would have paid for the iMacs had we not gotten the 3-year Apple Care warranty. Add in at least an hour or two to build each computer, then several more hours to install Windows and get all the drivers in working order, and it's just a pain that's not really worth our time (which could be better spent actually using the computers and helping teach and inspire our students).