A lot of that iMac's cost is its retina display, and you didn't bother buying a retina display for the PC. Running a speed test is silly, there are already major differences in the build.<p>To make this remotely more scientific, you'd either need to buy a 4k monitor for the PC, or use a Mac Pro and just take the monitor out of the equation.
I'm not a Apple fan, but I find most of these tests are counting seconds and then extrapolating that to actual work time, which I don't think actually maps as well as the author thinks.<p>The exception to this is 'smart previews' test which shows a 6.5 minute difference.<p>I've asked the creator of fileloupe (<a href="http://www.fileloupe.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.fileloupe.com/</a>) if his app would improve the performance of this one test. I know nothing about photos, so I don't even know what this 'smart preview' thing is...
I'm surprised by HN's response here. I always thought it was common knowledge that a custom PC would be faster than a mac. You don't pay for speed with Apple, you pay for user experience.
This guy managed to edit a 4k video on last years Macbook faster than a much beefier Windows computer:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnapaZYD2cU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnapaZYD2cU</a><p>I think that speaks to the "quality" of the software more than anything. I'm wiling to bet that Adobe Premiere would render that macbook useless. I wonder how much more(I can't imagine how difficult it is to write their software cross-platform) amazing the Adobe suite would be if they only focused on Windows (which allow for these super powered machines).
They could have saved some money on the iMacs by simply buying and installing the RAM themselves. If they opted for the 8GB Apple RAM they'd take $600 off the iMac price.<p>And the 1TB flash storage option they chose can also be questioned. I mean, 1TB of the iMac's internal flash storage is super expensive, but it's also WAY WAY faster than the Samsung 850 EVO in terms of read/write times. (Samsung 850 EVO has the SATA bottleneck.) My point is that if you know your process is constrained by CPU speed, don't put so much of your budget into fast storage. If they had opted for the 256 GB flash storage option in the iMac they'd take $700 off the price.<p>OTOH, I don't see a way around the inability to overclock the iMac's cpu. Stuck with 4.0 GHz (or 4.2 in Turbo boost).
> Speaking conservatively, a 25% difference in performance would turn an 8 hour wedding edit into 10 hours.<p>That's only true if all 8 hours are 100% spent waiting on the machine, which doesn't seem likely. This doesn't seem like a CPU-bound task. Most of the time is probably spent by the human actually looking at the photos and making decisions.
4000USD is a lot of money. That seems like an odd setup.<p>Not having ever wanted to buy a machine for that amount of cash, I'd expect to do better with multi-socket systems.<p>Anyone care to chime in? I struggled to spend over 1K GBP with my latest machine. (I think 'Extreme Edition' is basically like buying the S version of a car, mind). i7-5820K, 64GB ram.<p>One thing that does stick out is an odd monitor comparison. There's an expensive color repro "low" (in comparison) res monitor for the PC, against the standard iMac retina. Aren't there cheaper 4K monitors/TV's about?
These comparisons are silly. Now imagine it's a BMW vs someone's project car both with the same $$$ invested.<p>Yeah, the project car will probably smoke it. But not everyone wants a project car.
I wonder what would be the test results if they used a 4k display in Windows as well. Moving those many pixels has an extra cost.<p>Other than that, I find the review centered around their use case and well explained. Well done.
Final Thoughts > "... Apple is simply adding new products and updating product lines often times without much thought it seems. This can be seen in the horrid pen solution found in the iPad Pro where charging it requires you to have a spear sticking out of your iPad."<p>The above seem like a non-sequitur, but seems apt. I switched from Windows to OSX in 2007 to work exclusively on iOS. In the past year: I abandoned WatchOS due to artificial constraints, discovered that the Apple Pencil has an annoying skid/squeak, and an Auto-update from Xcode 7.2 to 7.3 broke my C++ toolchain. The last, of which, Apple QA has decided not to fix, even though XC 4 thru 7.2 worked just fine. Meanwhile, can't run Cuda on my year old MBP AMD Chipset. I may be switching platforms. Hence the interest in OP's article, including the tangental Final Thoughts.
This is a qualitative analysis at best. I live in both the PC and Mac world and I'll say this, Some of what you pay apple for is quality. I understand that many cannot fathom this, but their customer service net promoter score is very admirable. You get a quality machine. Style does matter, and you get style with a Mac as well. If style isn't important, explain to me why builders spend hours deciding on cases, lighting, and cable management. At the end of the day, these types of comparisons aren't going to sway anyone.
Of <i>course</i> a purpose-built PC will outperform an iMac, dollar for dollar. That's not exactly news. The iMac also has a severe price-to-performance disadvantage here by including an expensive 5K panel, while the PC is tested with a much cheaper 2560x1440 monitor.<p>However, the disappointing thing to me here is that you can't reach performance parity with the iMac by throwing more money at it. The iMac tested here is a completely maxed out machine.
Apple is delivering a turnkey hardware solution with the 5K iMac. They will also provide an upgrade path with future hardware generations. This article is the same-ole myopic view of DIY specifications and IT enterprise management. Macs are not built for people who can or want to do it themselves. Macs are built for people who ONLY want to focus on the task at hand.
Surprise, surprise. A custom-built, overclocked machine with more of its cost invested in its CPU was faster than one that wasn’t overclocked and is sold for looks and stability over raw performance. It’s not like the choice of almost all the components had absolutely no impact on the final result.
I haven't looked at it yet but I'm putting my money on the 4K PC kicking the crap out of the Mac, unless the screen kills the PC budget...<p>EDIT: Yep, for what it's worth, if you are doing retouch for print, pro studios use EIZO screens and they are usually around 2k-3k+ per unit.
That spec iMac is currently $3879 at MacMall [1],
To save money, you could easily spec a 4.0GHz/8GB/1TB FUS/M390 for $2299 from B&H [3], add the same SSD ($300) and ram from OWC ($328 for 32GB / $667 for 64GB). Bringing the total to $3266. We also need to go to a 5K 27 inch monitor on the PC side for a fair price comparison; the cheapest I could find was $1042 HP Z27q [4]. Add $42 to the PC price to make up for this.<p>Now, the PC price comes out to $4370+42=$4412, so we need to drop $1146 of from the PC to get a realistic price comparison. The RAM, Screen, SSD, and graphics card are anchored due to our Apples to Not Apples comparison. That leaves the motherboard, case, CPU, power supply and water cooler to drop in price.<p>I don't know water cooling particularly well, but lets say we leave that in to continue overclocking the CPU, but drop to a lesser model, same with the Power Supply and Case. So revised budget for each is:<p>Case: $125 -> $80
Power Supply: $140 -> $80
Water cooling: $120 -> $80<p>Now a gaming motherboard was selected because it's stable for overclocking, but let's throw caution to the wind and drop our budget to half that and hope it still overclocks stable. $480 -> $240<p>That leaves $261 for the CPU, which buys an i5-6600K (3.5GHz), or we drop the water cooling and run everything at stock to get to an i7-6700K (4GHz). In other words, the same processor in the iMac. If this benchmarks any differently, it's the Lightroom developers fault, not the hardware.<p>So, the upshot is, spending the same amount on a Mac will get you the same specs in a much better looking equivalent device.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.macmall.com/p/product~dpno~13697228~pdp.jhffibb?source=APPLEINSIDER02" rel="nofollow">http://www.macmall.com/p/product~dpno~13697228~pdp.jhffibb?s...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1190421-REG/apple_z0sd_mk47218_bh_27_imac_with_retina.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1190421-REG/apple_z0sd...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1190421-REG/apple_z0sd_mk47218_bh_27_imac_with_retina.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1190421-REG/apple_z0sd...</a><p>[4] <a href="http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=1142990&gclid=CMmWqobdrMwCFYo2gQodE6ACrg&Q=&ap=y&m=Y&c3api=1876%2C92051677802%2C&is=REG&A=details" rel="nofollow">http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=11429...</a>