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Boy did they drop the football in this area. I always thought the advantage to making the switch to more common PC architectures was the ability to keep pace and support a wider array of components and technologies.

Instead, they over-designed the enclosure and froze the high-end range of the platform. Creating a simple, but reliable tower design (optimized for speed rather than size) would have been extremely well received, would be nearly free money, and would have done wonders for the brand and their connection to creative pros.

Most of the pros I work with in the industry have gone from loving the mac to tolerating the mac. They are certainly looking around. I don't love Windows, but I have to admit that the Adobe Creative Suite now sings on a modern Windows machine.

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It wasn't always this way though. The early mac pro had case accessibility and ventilation improvements that predated Lian Li and their copycats. Today we have tower cases where the screwdriver and bandaids no longer required equipment to replace something in your computer, but it wasn't always that way.

It seems like the same group that made the new Mac Pro made the top-loading Mac Mini that kids put coins in, destroying the CDROM drive in the process. All form, no function.

> Most of the pros I work with in the industry have gone from loving the mac to tolerating the mac.

This is true of myself (UX Designer with 10+ years in the biz pushing code and design) and ALL of the creative types I associate with. I know Apple is something like 90% an iPhone company now, but I'd love to see some long term analysis on the damage they've done to themselves, and even the iPhone, by alienating ALL of the creative content creators of the world. I know I'm painting in broad strokes, but it's hard to overstate the positive mindshare and goodwill Apple used to enjoy in this community. Now they're just the new Microsoft-a necessary annoyance.

Agree 100%, I just refurbished my 6-year old Macbook Air instead of buying a new computer because Apple doesn't sell anything today I actually want. I know for sure my next tablet and my next phone won't be Apple, so they have until this 2011 Macbook Air dies (for the last time) to come up with something worth spending money on, or else I'm back to the PC market! Same goes for all of the Mac users I know, we lament the golden days of Apple but are glad to have experienced them.

This Apple is starting to go rotten.

When did CS not sing on Windows machines? To my knowledge Apple has never had a performance advantage over Windows.

I thought the Apple advantage has been workflow. For example, OS X is color-managed at the OS level. You can easily create a custom profile for your display without expensive 3rd party equipment.

And OS X uses the same language as PDF to composite the display, so it's easy to produce (color managed) PDFs from any application.

I've used Adobe since early 1990s versions on PCs, never had any issues. PS 4.0 was fantastic. Plus CS versions went 64 bit on Windows long before MacOS.

Plus Windows could actually multitask much better. My Dual P3-933 is still the fastest machine I've ever used compared to the hardware of the time. Amazing how much better a dual core (NT/2000) machine was.

They should just adapt the cheese grater to a mini itx format and work with that.

Agreed... as much as I'd prefer mATX, I think ITX would be the smartest bet... for that matter, if they'd sell "replacement" motherboards with a "core" fee (refunded on turning in the old MB), they could just turn even more of a blind eye to those that really want to go the DIY route with supported hardware. They don't make much money of the desktop users, but those users create most of their money making content for them.

Having a beautiful case that takes a standard ITX board would be great. Yeah, you might not get dual-gpu that way, but even a good ITX would be a huge step up from what they have now...

I liked the last of the G4s better since you could actually carry them comfortably and the door opened wider. I think my ideal case is a smaller G4 with doors on both sides.

People overestimate how a modern Mac Pro tower would work. A Mac Pro tower is not going to permit hackintosh-style hardware builds. They will force the use of whitelisted "supported" hardware, and sell it all themselves with their standard high markups.

Without proprietary hardware, there is not enough money in the market for them to bother with a tower in the first place. It would also put the "it just works" aspect of the Apple brand at risk, should customers use 3rd-party hardware components that wind up not functioning properly due to unofficial drivers. Apple has a public image to maintain, and they will not expose themselves to having customers claim that their Mac Pro "isn't working", blaming Apple instead of looking to the 3rd-party hardware manufacturer.

Seems like there is symmetry in everything: Apple enjoys doing badass engineering, that ends up totally not meeting the usability expectations of the customer. The gloating is only just baredly overshadowed by the sheer hubris.

Deleted this comment because it's apparently rubbing people the wrong way that I experienced poor performance using Adobe programs on a Windows machine and decided to share that experience.

I am very suspicious of the benchmarks that you pointed to. Maybe some users are reporting erroneous data?

Take a look at the Passmark list here: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

The i5 scores in at 7995, and the i7 4960HQ is 9770. If you are really CPU bound, there are going to be some big advantages for the i7 here.

Of course, if performance is so bad on the Windows machine that it is nearly unusable, then there is probably something else causing the issue.

Maybe that's the case, then? I just googled the comparison and that site I linked came up.

It is definitely possible. I switched to using Passmark almost exclusively after having some of the other sites give me some really horrible data a few times (CPU Boss, in my case).

If you want to go full speed optimization:

Go with about 4-8 times as much RAM, and Ramdisk your commonly used programs like PS/LR, and make sure you have a large swap space on a dedicated NVMe SSD. Also consider getting higher performing RAM. https://pcpartpicker.com/product/x3yxFT/corsair-memory-cmk32... is a relatively cheap high-performance RAM module. More ram per stick will get more expensive and have higher CAS latency.

Get at least a 7700k and OC to at least 4.8Ghz, though most will go higher. Consider buying from a known-bin site, such as https://siliconlottery.com/collections/all/products/7700k52g which has a chip known to perform stably at 5.2GHz.

Consider getting a high-end quadro instead of a consumer-level card- the P4000 is a good entry-level, while a P6000 is an absolute monster, though probably overpriced. NVidia claims better performance in Photoshop and Lightroom using those instead. http://www.nvidia.com/object/adobe.html

Consider a high-end Z270 ASRock motherboard. They are almost always the best choice for making everything else work together optimally.

You can always get better performance with more hardware and better configuration if you need to - is it worth it to you over buying a Mac though, and will the performance of that Mac actually be better?

Thanks for the suggestions. Maybe someone else here will find them helpful if they're considering a new build. I'm not in the market to build a new Windows computer after just building the one I have now a year ago, though. I'm fine with just using the Macbook for photo editing.

It's very possible that there's something else going wrong with my Windows desktop as it's setup now, and it should be running better than it does. Whatever that may be, I'm unsure. I would expect the programs to at least be usable, but they aren't.

And this isn't directed at you in particular, but I should probably make it clear (since for some reason my comments have been getting downvotes) that I'm not saying that Windows computers in general are incapable of running these programs, and I'm not a Mac fanboy in any sense of the word. I'm relaying what I've experienced. If I click and hold an adjustment brush, drag it an inch, let go of the mouse button, then move the mouse to another area of the screen, the program shouldn't lag to the point where it doesn't even register that I let off the adjustment brush and give me a stroke that goes across the entire photo. And yet it does. It doesn't benefit me at all to lie about it.

I've never heard that PS is supposed to run better on one platform. From my personal experience there's no difference. PS performs bad pretty much platform-independently. However I'd love to see some tests about this.

If there are tests you can point me to I'd love to run them. I admittedly haven't used either program much on the Windows PC, as I was turned off almost instantly when spot usage of clone/heal tools took on the order of seconds to complete.

Edit: I'd love an explanation as to why this was downvoted as well.

Adobe CS works great on my similarly spec'd (slightly worse) PC. Maybe try reinstalling? I do have an SSD- if yours is a platter that could affect performance too.

I use Creative Suite regularly on both PC and Mac and haven't really seen a difference in speed at all. All 3 computers I run it on have SSDs, though. Are you running SSD on the Windows side?

Yeah, mentioned that in another comment: ADATA Premier SP600 256 gig SSD

Could be a bad chip batch on the SSD. 3rd party SSD vendors are notorious for switching around NAND suppliers. Often they are forced to do so(since they do not control the supply like Samsung/Micron/Intel does)

Besides SP600 is not considered a particularly good SSD

Pretty much all SATA3 SSDs claim the top speed of 500MB+ read/ 300MB+ write which is a best case scenario.

Many lesser SSDs have problems in random read writes.

Could be the disk speed.

No disk drive. Running off of an ADATA Premier SP600 256 gig SSD, which is supposed to have 540MB/s read, 290MB/s write.

Pointing out the obvious here, but there seems to be something wrong with your build. Adobe CS should be running very smoothly in your system.

I have CS running on and old i3 machine with 8 GB of RAM with an SSD and an integrated video card, and Photoshop runs as fast as in my MBPr i7.

What's weird is that any game I throw at the machine (which is what I built it for) works flawlessly. It's only Lightroom/Photoshop that give me grief.