mantlepicture wrote: While many PCs are viable, to get a combination on par with a Mac, you will be spending about $500 more.
uh........I call bullshit. I was reading some of your earlier inflammatory posts about enhanced Mac reliability (made possible solely through strict hardware QC and, recently, leveraging of 20+ years of work by the BSD folks), and just for shits and giggles I decided to see what kind of system I could build today for the $700 I put into my last editing station. Shopping only from NewEgg, not only did I get in under budget (this was a headless system using a KVM), but I was able to significantly trade up on the processor (from Athlon XP to Athlon 64, same rating). Mini-Macs aside, Apple doesn't even OFFER a system in this price range, let alone $500 cheaper.
There are some objections to this; nothing has yet been mentioned about the Windows tax, or other software, or the fact that there are no labor costs figured in since the end-user would have to do all the assembly.
The first is easily settled: nobody has to pay the Windows tax any more. Linux may not be 100% "there" yet, wherever the hell "there" is, but there is a significant minority of editors around here who do use it for their work, and it seems to come out just fine. Another option is to use the student exemption that you cited in getting reasonable prices on Avid; if you belong to the engineering department at the right school, as I did, you may have the option of getting the Microsoft OS of your choice for free.
As for the second: other people probably won't be able to get Magix for $13, like I did, but $50, as posted above, is more than reasonable. If, as you say, AMV isn't as demanding as professional editing, there's no need to spend 6x as much on a professional-quality editing suite that additionally hogs a USB port.
Finally, the last reason is a valid concern, but is the #1 reason that tech people came to prefer x86/x86-64 architechtures. If you know what you're doing, you can buy high-quality parts and build your own box yourself, saving huge on labor costs. So has it been, so shall it be, at least as long as Apple remains a hardware company.
If you'd kindly post the specs of what you consider to be an optimal Mac editing setup, I'm sure that someone here could assemble a comparable x86/x86-64 system for comparable or lesser cost.
--K
