Next time you import or export, hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE and check out your CPU core usage. You’ll get a graphical percent usage chart for each core. On my Pentium D machine (admittedly, a couple years old, which is why it needed replacing), it only ever used one core for batch processing. Luckily, it was a fast core, even by today’s standards.

Also, I had less RAM, and frequently had Lightroom open for several hours. There was a known memory leak on the Windows build of Lightroom through version 2.something-or-other, which bogged things down on the PC considerably – not so on the Mac. I have frequently left it crunching and come back hours later to find it still snappy as ever.

In short, the Mac version still managed to do a lot more with a lot fewer resources – and my PC was running a hardware RAID 5 system that did 110MB/sec read / 100MB/sec writes (no single drive at the time could come anywhere close to that performance), compared to the Mac system with about half that HD throughput.

Maybe that was all due to a Lightroom bug that has since been squashed, but whether that’s true or not, I’m still very happy to be free of Windows. Long live OS X!

- Eric

I’m kidding… Kinda…

I have both and the new macbook is slow in performance compared to my quadcore. I think there are several things that are important.
You need a good quadcore to really crunch those previews and exports… you have to have more than 4GB of ram to handle large catalogs of pictures and the speed really comes into play with a fast HD.
So perhaps that’s my downfall having a macbookpro with a slower HDD

On the other hand I have the fastest rated HDD in the world on my desktop PC.

Yes… guess which computer looks better. You’re right the macbook.
Guess which one I take on trips… yep the macbook.

Guess which one edits better and faster… and cost half the cost? Sorry… but it’s the truth.

I bet a macpro 4-8core machine could perform on the same level. (Granted it doesn’t have an option to use the fusio IO drive… but with a good SSD drive it could be right there and perhaps better… for 2-3 times the cost though… that’s what I’m saying)

And my hopes are to sell off this machine and get a new i7 machine.

I built a PC desktop. I’ve always built my own desktop systems. I’m that techie friend that everybody hired to build their PC’s. However, Abode Lightroom’s import and export actions DID NOT take advantage of extra cores under Windows XP – and the overhead of the Windows XP OS bogged down the Lightroom UI, tremendously. And Vista is 20% slower than XP for photo processing! 3GB of RAM, 2.6 Ghz dual core CPU, and it absolutely crawled.

And then I edited on a 1.6 Ghz iBook with 2GB RAM, and Lightroom was snappy, responsive – dare I say it? FAST by comparison. On paper, those Windows boxes just toast the hell out of the Macs, but in real life, the Macs are clobbering the PCs in actual performance.

I was sold. Lightroom is even faster on my new Core2 Duo MacBook. Oh, and the beast of a computer cost twice as much as my Apple certified refurb MacBook. And I couldn’t take it ANYWHERE. It just had no sense of style whatsoever. How embarrassing!

I take my MacBook everywhere, and everybody is always telling me how pretty it looks.

PC’s suck.

- Eric

So I like mac laptops but I wouldn’t really consider editing prolonged time with a laptop.
And like mike said… mac has nothing midrange. (worthy discussing, unless you’re not doing tons of editing in which case those bigscreen all in one thingies could be nice)

I love the freedom and flexibility of building a PC.

Because this setup like mike mentioned isn’t even the most extreme… it’s just the newest tech at the best bang for buck.

And yes Lightroom uses all 8cores and it’s not just every blue moon… it uses it all the time and it comes in handy and it saves time.

(Does photoshop really max out all 8 cores?)

Alas. I used to be like you building my own screaming PC for half the cost of the closest comparable Mac. Built PCs for years. I have to admit that I miss the flexibility of building your own machine– there really is nothing in the middle range for Mac. iMacs and MacBook Pros are underpowered, as you mentioned, and frankly I don’t need a Xeon class processor. Something for about $1k-1.5k with an iCore7 would be perfect for my needs.