SLR Lounge’s  test saw a custom built PC annihilate a $4,000 Mac in each of the tasks performed in SLR Lounge’s Lightroom challenge. The PC spec based around an Intel I7-5960x @ 3.00ghz Overclocked To 4.5ghz ($1025), Asus Rog Rampage V Extreme($480), Ram 64gb ($350), Evga Nvidia Geforce Gtx 980 Ti ($630), Samsung 850 Evo 1tb ($300), Corsair 450d Case ($125), Corsair Ax860 Power Supply ($140), Corsair Hydro H110 Water Cooler ($120), Windows 10 Pro ($100/$200), Eizo 27? Flexscan Ips Display 2560×1440 ($1000). The rig cost $4,370. The Mac had Intel i7 Quad-Core 4.00Ghz, 32GB 1867Mhz DDR3 SDRAM, 1TB Flash Storage, AMD Radeon R9 M395X w/ 4GB Video Memory and cost $4,431.

SLR tested real world performance on day to day tasks, which is what’s the most important to many people, and with performance differences ranging from 26 per cent to 114 per cent. For example a Lightroom Import of 1,121 images directly from the internal SSD drive on each machine took the Mac 26.81 seconds while the PC took 12.51.

Of course the Tame Apple Press has moaned that the test was unfairly balanced towards the custom PC’s favour. The 5K Retina display of the 27? Mac is about $2,000 of the Mac’s value, while the PC’s Eizo monitor cost about half of that, allowing for an extra $1,000 to be spent on the PC’s hardware to boost performance.

But welcome to the downside of Macland. You are generally forced to buy a monitor because everything’s built into it, effectively doubling the cost of replacing the computer.

Another issue was the fact that Apple has not updated its Mac for ages, although apparently the custom PC is a year old too. Generally it looks like the concept that Macs are good for content creation is just one of those myths that no one has actually questioned, until now.