I did a little exercise of price comparing a spec’ed out Lenovo X220, and 13 inch mbp. Surprisingly, they came out to about the same (core i7 2.7ghz, 8gb ram, 128gb ssd)

I realized, when you actually do the PC/Mac price comparison, the only angle that matters is Mac vs custom built PC. Comparing Mac to other vendors stuff gets you mostly comparable prices. The MBP is pretty good for what you get, and so if the iMac (esp. the screen).

Aside from the fact that Apple is missing a non-integrated mid-range desktop from their line, if you’re out to buy an entire PC from a vendor, there’s no much reason to pick a PC for it’s price (unless you’re just looking at the uber-cheap stuff, which Apple doesn’t really compete with directly, and you could also argue that ipad kinda competes with low end PCs a little bit).

With the custom built PC, you get the mid-range desktop that Apple doesn’t have. But it also allows you to get the subset of the Mac Pro that you need, and not pay the extra $1000 for the stuff that you don’t need. If there was a Mac Pro that didn’t use top of the line Xeons, for $1000 cheaper, I probably would have bought it already.