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Comment by SippinLean | Hacker News Reader

I understand the consumer market for, say pre-built Dell desktops with an i3 you get your mom for surfing the web.

What graphics professional isn't assembling their own rig though? $3k is a LOT of money to spend on a desktop.

I'm old enough to remember dedicated SGI workstations, and a decade ago I felt OSX had some advantages in graphics, I can't think of any of those that exist today, at least to justify such a huge markup on parts I could buy myself.

I'm generally curious, I feel like I'm missing out, people that would consider paying $3k for a computer made out of easily-obtained components, why is it worth it to you?

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My wife has a photography business. Photoshop and Lightroom are essential tools for her.

Right now she uses Windows 7 Pro. We can't stay on it long-term because of security (and eventually driver) issues.

Migrating to Windows 10 (non-enterprise) isn't an option because the forced updates are an unacceptable risk to downtime, especially at certain points in her business calendar (e.g., highschool yearbook photo season).

We may end up migrating to a new Mac Pro, but it won't be because the hardware is awesome. Truth be told, it will likely be overkill for her needs, and definitely overpriced.

We'd migrate her business to a Mac Pro because OS X doesn't have Windows 10's problems, and because we can probably recover from a hardware failure quickly due to the system's expected modularity.

I'm not here to sing Windows' praises, Win10 has had it share of annoyances for me, but I've just set it (non-enterprise) to have to prompt me for updates, there are no forced updates. If that is the big feature that has you prepared to spend a hefty premium you might look into it further.

> Photoshop and Lightroom are essential tools

Those are in the cloud now, and performance is mostly based on your GPU.

>Truth be told, it will likely be overkill for her needs, and definitely overpriced.

>We'd migrate her business to a Mac Pro because OS X doesn't have Windows 10's problems

This is insightful, thank you.

>because we can probably recover from a hardware failure quickly due to the system's expected modularity

Every hand-built PC will be just as or more modular though. If that's your concern, look at, say the Mac Minis with the RAM soldered in, I love Apple industrial design but don't like how hard it is to upgrade the hardware, generally.

Easy: One vendor, one support contract/warranty.

There's one number to call, and they'll repair any part of the machine up to and including swapping out the whole thing. Anyone buying a machine that expensive they really need would(and should) be looking at 24 hour turn around on site service anyways.

And the only way to really get that is to buy a whole prebuilt machine from $BIGCOMPANY

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