A bluetooth dongle is 15 bucks. Wireless keyboard and wireless MX Revolution mouse were already here from previous builds. Available hardware and software support? That's for "amateurs" that need their hands held. I am my own support staff. Wifi is on my router, serving my phones, laptops, and pmp's...you know, portable stuff. My monitor is unbroken and doesn't flicker. And it doesn't run on a (mobile?)4850...lol.
I don't understand what you are doing with your price list either. What I posted is what I paid. My total is 2500. What did the iMac cost with shipping and CA tax?
And who made you the judge? That's like having the fox guard the fracken hen house. You are about as impartial as Barney Frank at a gay pride festival.
What I have been working to hear you say is that this mid range iMac with a hobbled dual channel i7 is better than a Mac Pro, or better than a PC more powerful than a Mac Pro. I figured that would make my day. And that's what you just did. Amazing. Thanks for playing.
Optical audio out? Yes. "Optical digital audio output" Has been for years. On sound? You seem to forget that Apple and Macs are the choice for professionals in video and audio mixing. It has all of that. Didn't you read that Wired Magazine stated that the 27" iMac supports over clocking to 4.0GHz??? Apple itself officially supports it to 3.46 Ghz.
USB ports? How many do you need built in? Why have a dedicated HDMI port? The Mini Display port supports it and is now an official standard port. The Mini Display port to HDMI cable sells for about the same as a good quality HDMI cable... so what's the point? The triple Channel DDR3 at 1600 is supported on the Mac Pros as are even faster and more powerful professional grade Xeon processors than the consumer grade i7s. PCIe slots. Had them for years on the Mac Pro.
Is your PC have all of its components inside an Aircraft Grade Aluminum machined uniblock Monitor sized case? Does it operate virtually silently? Does it take up minimal desk top space? Minimal cabling? No. Then it doesn't meet the challenge of meeting the specs.
And it doesn't run on a (mobile?) 4850...lol.
That ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics processor with 512MB of GDDR3 memory simultaneously supports the built-in 27" at 2560 by 1440 pixels and an external 30" at 2560 by 1600 pixel both with 16.7 million colors. It can easily handle the 1GB per second of video data flow demand and buffering that the two monitors require. That's more than adequate when combined with Apple's Core Graphics, Core Image, and Core Animations technologies.
My monitor is unbroken and doesn't flicker
The broken monitors and the flickering is being reported on a small number of shipped 27" iMacs. the vast majority are being delivered without incident or problem. The flicker is probably related to defective components considering the very small number of reports ... and the cracked screens most likely to mishandling given Apple's almost anal dedication to packaging design and testing. Those are problems that appear in almost any new product roll out and will be handled as Apple is handling them: replace the broken ones, and update/fix the issue with the flickering under warranty. WE could bring up the math errors in the Intel 286 processors of a couple of decades ago... remember those? What's an numerical error a few places to the right of the decimal point among friends?
The iMac's and your PC's Sales tax in California is irrelevant to the cost comparison. . . omit it from both. . . and the iMac's shipping is always free.
It is YOU who is claiming, against evidence, that an Intel i7 is a better processor than an Intel Xeon processor in the Mac Pro. Not me. It's you who tried to claim that virtual cores were the same as actual cores. You keep trying. I have not said that. Intel would disagree with you. There is a reason Intel differentiate their i7 and Xeon brands and charges more for the Xeon. There's a reason why the Xeon's use more expensive Buffered, error correcting RAM. The i7 is a intended to be a consumer grade DESKTOP processor. The Xeon is a professional grade, workstation class processor...
Just exactly what do you use your speed demon PC for, Joe? Gaming?