Dell can sell you a workstation with dual CPUs, dual GPUs, 3TB of ECC RAM, and a combination of up to 8 NVMe disks or 10 SATA/SAS disks. And the entire thing (including disks) can be covered by an onsite warranty that will send a technician, with parts, to your location within 4 hours, 24/7, for up to 7 years.

You cannot get those specs, or anything near that warranty, from commodity desktop hardware.

In some areas you could leverage "Amazon Prime Now" for 1-2 hour delivery on replacement computer parts

I did that back in 2016 when I needed to upgrade my GPU to play a new game after getting off work

You still have to pay more for replacement parts though, which is not how warranties work

Yes but is it matter if entire computer is 2x expensive?

Anecdote: In Japan, SanDisk sells "genuine" SD cards extremely expensive (about x3-x7 for US price). Importing SD cards from US (or buy from local importer, it's common) is makes sense even though it has no warranty.

Things are a bit different if you are running IT for a large organization instead of buying your own computer though.

Generally speaking Amazon is not going to have 1000 of a specific computer part in a 2-hour delivery window. You could order different parts but then you now have increasing numbers of variations of setups and you don‘t want to be fixing lots of small unrelated problems than a widespread issue which has the same fix all the time.

And for corporations it is better to have the cost paid for upfront; it is expensive, and hard to get approvals for unexpected budget items.

Fully agree. So even SanDisk can sell products in such price.

This. It was buy a new iMac time earlier this year for me and I ended up with a Ryzen custom build.

The crate itself, a 3700X w/ 64GB of RAM, 1TiB NVMe, 1660 GTX didn't cost much more than the 64GB of RAM for the iMac was going to cost on its own...

We do the same at our small company. We recently gave all the developers a budget to use to build a custom workstation. The only requirement was being able to do the work we need to do effectively. We also provided a few template configurations with Ryzens for those who didn't want to have to think about this. But many of us really enjoyed the opportunity to create a custom configuration using whatever internals we preferred, as well as monitors, keyboards, mice, headphones, etc. that fit our preferences.

Which ryzen? What are the other specs?

2700X, 64GB DDR-3200, RTX2080, 2TB nvme storage - I'm due a new one, thinking 5950X next time.

I have so many questions, please ignore if this is overwhelming.

But do you know how much of a cost savings that is ballpark?

Also do you have a guide that you follow? I'd like to replace my Macbook Pro but I don't really know where to start.

Also is there a resource for a noob to run unit testing to if my performance is better when I'm done?

That PC is old now but it’s modern equiv would run around £2K give or take.

That would get you a Ryzen 3 which would be substantially faster than mine and a RTX3070 which would crush my 2080.

With two 27” 4K screens my PC came out about the same as a MacBook Pro but is much faster on the workloads I care about and as nice the MacBook Pro screen is 2x4K is better.

Bit less portable though.

Software wise Fedora is as stable as OSX and has everything I need (I’ve been Linux as a primary dev platform since the turn of the millennium) and in fact things have never been better, pretty much everything supports Linux at least that most devs need in 2020 (Xcode is an exception).

Gnome will feel most like OSX but I prefer Cinnamon.

Prices are substantially cheaper in the US.