$4,000 PC Destroys $4,000 iMac in Lightroom Performance Test, Report

It’s a sad fact for us Mac-lovers, but dollar for dollar, an Apple computer can’t keep up with a custom-built PC. And if you have any doubts about the veracity of that claim, a new report by the folks at SLR Lounge should put them to bed.

You can read the full specs of the computers tested as well as the detailed results here, but the long and short of it is this: the $4,431 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K Display was anywhere from 26% to 114% slower than their $4,370 custom-built PC at every single task tested… and they repeated each test multiple times to make sure they were being accurate.

The final verdict was easy to come to for SLR Lounge‘s Pye Jirsa. As he opines in the comments:

I think I was the most shocked by this comparison. I love Apple products and their designs (especially while Steve Jobs was around, I feel like they have gone down hill since then). But, I still just can’t justify the price to performance. I sat there re-running the tests multiple times just to make sure.

Check out the full report on SLR Lounge.