[stoppingdown]

LOL - being in the computer business since decades, I'm not surprised by these debates.

 

I think that the benchmarks have a value, if they have been ran in the proper way, but the value of those data depends on the context.

 

First, it's quite obvious that the maximum performance of a computing system is achieved by picking the best parts and assembling them, instead of buying a pre-made product. It's also well-known that Apple stuff is expensive; OTOH taking advantage of the broader competition in the PC side you can enjoy lower prices. The problem, as others said, is that performance is not the only quality of systems, and reliability is another. While I've been in the unlucky side of Mac owners (my late-2011 MBP suffered from a well known issue with the discrete graphics board, that broke twice - pain and money, until at last Apple was pressured to reckon the problem and at least I was refunded). But in the end I'm much more relaxed with my Mac stuff, when I compare to the long series of PC that I owned (and, BTW, I still own: for my business I have to continuously deal with Windows and Linux).

 

For security, I think there are reasons to say Mac OS X is better, but there is not an abyss. For instance, I've been running a shield with an anti-virus on my Mac for several years now. The point is that it is less intrusive and has a lesser impact than the similar products I see on Windows (exclude Windows 10, that I don't have a deep experience with).

 

There are also things to consider. What are your priorities? If you are a pro, or an advanced amateur that likes to invest a lot in your hobby, and have a real concern about speed so that you might consider having a dedicate workstation for post-processing, and do nothing else on that, the benchmark makes sense and the PC approach makes sense. If you are going to have a single computer, typically a laptop, where you do also everything else, the thing makes less sense. Honestly, I'd be happy to post-process faster: my laptop is in its final working year, which means it's obsolete, and I understand I waste 30-40% of my time while I prune my photos; this has an impact, since I have a long backlog of things to do. Amen. I

 

 

There are also a couple of points that, AFAIU, the benchmark misses. The former: today IMO it doesn't make sense to have a computer without disk encryption, for a number of possible enemies. I'm not a pro, and I won't suffer economic loss if somebody steals my photos, but I'd be extremely disappointed. Having part of the disk encrypted, when you keep sensible stuff, and part in clear text doesn't make sense: there's always the risk of erroneously copying sensible files to the clear text partition, and once you've written something on a SSD chances are you can't be sure to safely delete it. So, everything should be encrypted, but the benchmark seems not to take care of that.

 

The latter point: it would have made sense to take the Mac desktop, install Windows on it and re-run the benchmark, just to understand whether the performance difference is due to the hardware or the operating system (or the lack of optimisation by Adobe).