You certainly can homebrew the hardware of a WinPC of decent quality, and add a low-end copy of Windows, cheaper than the cost of a new Mac. But then you have a Windows machine, not a Mac. To get the equivalent capabilities of the Mac (OS, built-in applications) you spend more money than just for the hardware and baseline Windows OS. Of course, not everyone thinks that's desirable; tastes vary.
> The premise is that there is no warranty if you build your own. The reality is that if you bought good quality parts, they all came with a warranty, and vendors of major components provide support like firmware and driver updates and support forums. As far as support goes, it's unlikely that someone who buliding their own computer would have much need for outside support.
That's a good point. And I'll grant you that I follow that path myself at times.
> You submit that you've built your own, but only as an exercise in learning about multi-boot. Setting up multi-boot is simply a matter of OS installtion options, and possibly bios settings if you're wanting to select boot from different physical devices. You can do that with off-the-shelf systems just as well as what you built yourself.
I see I was unclear in telling the story; sorry about that. Here's a clearer cut at it.
I myself have built, on average, one homebrew computer every 2 years or so, since 1976. The first few were hand wire-wrapped 6502-, 6800-, and 6809-based; I did my own circuit designs and wrote my own BIOS and drivers. Later ones were constructed from a mobo, CPU, RAM, and board-level components, based on x86 CPUs. Something around a dozen home-built machines overall.
My daughter was born in 1993. Her first computer was a 386-based box built from components with DOS and Win95 on it, that I made for her (she was 5). She helped construct, and used, a couple of other built-from-component Windows and Linux boxes until in 2005 or so she said she wanted a multi-boot system and wanted to learn how to do it herself.
So no, only that most recent homebrew of hers was a learning experience in multi-boot. I'd been doing multi-OS systems for years before that (around 2002 or so).
It was a Big Deal to decide that she would buy a Mac, and she had mixed feelings about it. It was the first machine she used at home that wasn't homebrew. She justified it on the basis that she needed a portable, and building her own portable wasn't practical from a mechanical reliability point of view.
My long run of homebrews was really for two reasons: I wanted to learn, and I wanted exactly what I wanted. I still build systems from components when I need something out of the ordinary, but most of the time a commercial assembled system does the job and saves me enough time to justify the extra cost of somebody else putting it together. Some are WinPCs, some are Macs. I'm not a partisan, I just have a lot of different jobs to do, and try to get a tool that best fits the task. While having fun and still learning. :)
If the requrement is that if have a Mac OS, then the question of whether it's cheaper to build your own is moot. As far as whether a modern Windows PC is "equivalent" to it's Mac counterpart that's pretty subjective. As long as there is any difference, someone will find it significant enough to justify saying they are not "equivalent".