Hopefully, the discussion is not to gain agreement, but to help another member make a good decision. My point is that it is not just the computer hardware you’re comparing and purchasing. Windows is a less desirable and more unstable platform. Right out of the gate, parameter to parameter, there may be real cost differences between computers, although when I was purchasing and looked on Dell they were relatively minor. But Windows requires maintenance to keep up the performance over time and Apple rarely does. If you’re paying an iT guy, that my be fine. The cost factor quickly diminishes as you upgrade software over a decade as well. It’s shocking what a short time has passed since Windows 2008. I don’t look at cost just as a purchase price, and think someone purchasing is smart to look at the entire picture. Too often, the hassle factor of Windows is immense. There is a reason professionals almost universally use Mac.

Well, I am pretty clearly in in the below $2000 region, though I wouldn't mind being above it LOL! Thanks for the tuning link. Haven't had time to play with it but it sound like it will be helpful in at least 2 areas. I am taking into account the screen as well as the performance, which makes comparisons more difficult. The 5K screen is really beautiful! I just didn't want to find that actual performance didn't keep pace so that I spent a lot of time looking at the beautiful screen awaiting changes after making adjustments. I am pretty definitely going to attend the free Apple workshops in the meantime so that I can make a better decision after seeing and working with the OS.

The kind of speed that guy's talking about is not raw computer speed. It's about the human activity in interacting with the machine. Some tasks are simply easier to do with the Mac, and that makes it the choice for those tasks. The same is true for other tasks... They are easier done with Windows.

The two platforms are inherently different, but with many similarities. I'd much rather use a Windows box for FileMaker Pro database work, Excel, and Outlook, where those tools integrate better in a business environment with larger systems and various software utilities. If you're in the Microsoft environment, you simply need Windows. Even IBM, where about a third of its computers are Macs, they run Windows on many of those Macs, right along side the MacOS.

I'd rather use a Mac for creating manuals in Word, or editing sound in Garage Band or Audacity, and editing video in Final Cut Pro X. That's partly for all the built-in aids for screen captures, partly for the integration of other Apple apps with my main heavy lifters, and partly because Final Cut Pro X and Apple hardware are engineered and optimized to work in tandem. On newer Macs, the T2 chip handles a lot of FCPX processing that would be slower on other hardware.

As Adobe and others figure out how to use the Metal Graphics better, Mac speeds on their CC software will improve. In the past year, Premiere Pro has improved dramatically on the Mac platform. Previously, Premiere Pro was a lazy dog on the Mac. Be that as it may, Final Cut Pro X has a *workflow* that is much more efficient than most PC editors. Again, that is because it is designed to appeal to human factors. I find FCPX to be one of the most intuitive interfaces of any timeline editor I've ever seen. It's hard to quantify, other than to say it's like the differences between PageMaker and QuarkXPress back in the 1990s. If you knew nothing about graphic arts when you started, Quark made more sense. If you had a history of working with analog graphic arts tools, you wanted PageMaker, and Adobe pissed you off when they dropped PageMaker and introduced InDesign, a Quark wannabe.

From 1986 to 2008, I had a Mac and a PC on my desk. My compromise since 2008 is to run everything on a Mac, using Parallels Desktop to run a virtual copy of Windows and Windows apps in a separate partition. That allows the best of both worlds on one computer, and keeps me in the right environment for the ways I need to work. In my heavy training content development years of the late 2000s, I was using Mac utilities to do things with WinXP I simply couldn't do in Windows alone. I was able to develop FileMaker Pro databases on the Mac, then test them and tweak them on Windows, and integrate them with Windows utilities that wouldn't run on the Mac. The workflow advantages outweighed any speed reductions I encountered due to slower hardware and strained resources.

Bill, I’m guessing that the speed of interacting with the machine is largely controlled by the familiarity with the OS and the specific application - would you agree?

The post I was responding to suggested that you couldn’t judge computing speed on HW alone, which I took to mean that MacOS is faster than Windows, making the HW differences inconsequential, and everything I can find suggests that isn’t true. Regardless of the fact that you CAN edit with an I-5, I personally think that buying a computer for long term use (multiple responders have stated that Macs last longer and are kept longer than PCs) with a 4-core I-5 is very short sighted, and I think selling 2K$+ platforms with an I-5 to be used for compute intensive tasks such as photo editing is offering yesterday’s machines at tomorrow’s pricing, and that is my main issue with a Mac - an I-7 or I-9 or AMD equivalent ought to be STANDARD on any machine costing north of 2K$.

I have recently run some controlled tests doing raw to TIFF conversions (which can take awhile for a big batch) on a (fast) I-5 machine with 32 GB of memory and all SSD storage. The results showed that there was never more than 35% of the 32GB used and only 8% on average of the I/O bandwidth, but the CPU was maxed all the time, so clearly, for this image processing task (which is a typical PP task), we need more HP than an I-5. Now whether more cores helps the particular ap you’re running depends on how well the code is parallelized, but the fact is that for even for single thread performance, a fast I-7 or I-9 or Xeon (or AMD Threadripper or Ryzen) is faster than a fast I-5, and if it’s 2x the speed and it takes 10 minutes to convert 200 images or assemble a large panorama or..., that to me is a pretty significant time saving (unless one just has nothing else to do except wait for a computer).

Point 1, I'll agree to an extent. But it goes beyond that to the design of the OS itself, and the design of specific apps that are made to run with it. That's why I use both platforms. In some cases, I haven't found a decent app on either platform. In others, it's a toss-up.

If you want to see the best of what Apple is doing these days, check out the new entry-level 16" MacBook Pro. It's probably the best overall value in their line-up now. https://youtu.be/zKpXOycoJeA

The Mac Pro is getting lots of grief for it's price in maximum configuration (well over $50K), but most similar workstation class machines cost more when configured to equivalent specs. https://youtu.be/fsHWHaXrWAM

I'm quite happy with my i5 for now, but my next machine will be a 16" MacBook Pro with 6-core i7 and minor upgrades to RAM and SSD. I almost never use TIFF files, unless as intermediates of single images. I keep everything raw in Lightroom, exporting straight to JPEG or printing to a locally attached printer. When I do need a Nik plug-in or Photoshop, I'll use a 16-bit TIFF or PSD in ProPhoto RGB, and bounce that back to LR.

Final Cut Pro X gets a lot of its speed from Metal graphics, and from on-the-fly rendering of image adjustments, titles, LUTs and effects, so when it comes time to export, that step doesn't require a complete rendering.

I’m not a fan of 16 bit TIFFs either (because of their size), but when I convert from raw (which I keep forever) into photoshop from DPP, I need an intermediate file format, and that’s how DPP exports into PS. DPP is an excellent raw converter for Canon, but limited as an editor, hence the need for the TIFFs. After I import and edit in PS, I can export into JPEGs and delete the TIFFs (keeping the raws), but it’s that conversion that is one of several CPU intensive operations (like stacking or panoramas) that will drive me to a faster processor.

The other reason to buy HW for the future is that SW designers NEVER seem (unless designing for real-time applications) to use the extra processing power of new technology for speed - they add new features and capabilities, so if you use new aps with your old HW, they will just run slower and slower. The net-net is that the next machine I build will have the fastest CPU, memory and disk I can afford (and it won’t be an I-5)

I have been using a Toshiba laptop, but trying to edit photos on it drives me a little nuts: small screen (and my eyes are getting older!), limited graphics capabilities, etc. I have no experience with Apple products, but Costco has this on sale, and the 5K screen is pretty amazing:

New Apple iMac 27" - Intel Core i5 3.0 GHz - 8GB Memory - 1TB Fusion Drive - 4GB Radeon Pro 570X Graphics At $1729, not cheap, so it better be worth it.

https://www.costco.com/new-apple-imac-27%22---intel-core-i5-3.0-ghz---8gb-memory---1tb-fusion-drive---4gb-radeon-pro-570x-graphics.product.100484366.html

I primarily use Lightroom and have just started to learn Photoshop, both of which are beginning to run a little slow. Luminar 4 shows significant lag.

Has anyone had experience with this computer and how do you regard it's suitability for photo editing and DAM? Any other thoughts about it, good or bad? It seemed like the RAM and graphics card were a little limited for something this expensive, but as I said, I don't know Apple.

Thanks in advance.

These days, if you want to use a Mac, there is little reason you can't equip it to be a Windows PC as well.

All Intel-based Macs are basically PCs. MacOS comes with BootCamp Assistant, a utility that allows you to partition a drive and install Windows on it. It installs and runs Windows natively on the Mac, and it provides device drivers for all the Mac hardware to run properly on Windows. Holding down the Option key at Startup allows you to choose your startup drive...

Another approach is to run emulation software. It USED to be slow, way back in the days of the PowerPC processor and Connectix Virtual PC. But no more!

Parallels Desktop has been a favorite of mine for over a decade. It lets us run any release of Windows and its applications AS an application, IN MacOS. The "performance hit" as compared with BootCamp running Windows natively is less than 12%. It allows sharing of drives, network resources, printers... and you can cut and paste between the applications running in the two different operating systems. You can use multiple monitors and put MacOS apps on one and Windows apps on another. Emulation DOES require enough processor cores, graphics card memory, RAM, and storage space to accommodate the two systems and the applications you run, but the convenience of having one computer capable of running ALL your apps is worth it. I worked that way on the road, using a MacBook Pro with Windows and everything I needed on it. Prior to that, I had a Mac and a PC on my desk for almost 20 years.

My home desktop is an iMac equipped with Parallels so I can complete projects that originated at work on high end Dell workstations designed for image processing of dicom images. It works ok, but I often need to use a PC, as not all software works reliably on Parallels, or if it does, it is cludgy, prone to freeze, and has a hard time integrating multiple applications often needed to complete the project. In my line of work, the IT managers frown on folks bringing in a Mac, as it complicates their work to update apps and install new apps as needed.