KITA

Mike Wuerthele said:

foregoneconclusion said:

Mike Wuerthele said: While I understand where you're coming from, legacy apps are called legacy for a reason, and aren't primary use cases.

If you're talking about professional software that people typically use on a laptop, the vast majority qualifies as legacy. For example, Photoshop is a legacy app. The annual focus is primarily on added features, not overhauling the code for greater efficiency. Occasionally that will happen, but it's not something anyone banks on year to year. That's the reason brute force for hardware gets so much attention: people know the software lags way behind. In this comparison, there isn't really a big enough brute force difference to think legacy apps are going to be that different of an experience. 

What? I agree that Adobe isn't that interested in efficiency, but Photoshop absolutely benefits from more powerful hardware.

Something that only utilizes a single core won't have seen much, if any, speed increase in the last six years, but Photoshop certainly doesn't qualify as that.

Photoshop is an interesting application to look at since in most cases, it does not take advantage of CPUs that have a large number of cores. That means that the 28 cores in the Mac Pro are not being used to its full potential, but neither are the 18, 32, or 64 cores that are found in some of our PC configurations.

Here, it is all about the per-core performance of the system which is determined largely by the maximum Turbo frequency as well as the processor's architecture. In the end, the result is that the $20k Mac Pro with 20 cores performs on par with the much less expensive 14-core iMac Pro. Many of the PC configurations are within a few percent of this result as well, although the Intel Core i9 9900K, AMD Threadripper 3960X/3970X, and AMD Ryzen 3900X/3950X CPUs are all around 10% faster than the Mac Pro.

Since we are specifically looking at video cards in this post, we are going to mostly examine the "GPU Score (16 Bits/Channel)" result. If you scroll to the next chart to look at the "Overall Score", you will notice that there isn't much of a difference between each GPU when looking at Photoshop performance from an overall perspective. In fact, in that case even the NVIDIA Titan RTX is only ~5% faster than the integrated graphics on the Core i9 9900K. However, if we look at just the tasks that actually benefit from using a discrete GPU, we at least get enough of a separation between the different models to pull out some useful information.

...

Photoshop is not exactly a GPU powerhouse. There isn't much reason to use a higher-end NVIDIA GPU, and even if we only look at the tasks that utilize the GPU, there is only about a 10% advantage at most for using NVIDIA over AMD. This isn't nothing, but it also isn't likely to be a deal breaker for many users.

bobolicious said:

Do the larger Razer models compare even more favourably with the equivalent MacBook Pros in review... ?

AppleInsider said:

sagan_student said:

KITA said:

With iPadOS and Android, neither of these are an ideal portable workstation.

Similar to the Surface Go 2 article (https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/comment/3238354), this article has also done very little to touch upon the actual use cases and ecosystem these devices offer.

At the end of the day, if you want a solid tablet for media consumption and very light workloads, get the iPad Pro.

If you want a tablet device for productivity in this size and form factor, get a Surface Go 2.

Don't get a Samsung Galaxy Tab S6.

Not sure what you consider ‘very light’ workloads. I am a high school teacher and Masters student that has been using the original 12.9” iPad Pro for my teaching and research/writing needs for the past 4.5 years. It is the only computer that I use at home. My division provides me with a Dell (now 5 years old) and it feels to be at least 2x slower than my iPad. The only area that the desktop wins out is in screen real-estate, but that has been addressed with the USB-C models. Now, it does all depend on what one considers a light workload, but I use Word, Teams, OneNote, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, PDF Pro, Whiteboard, Explain EDU, SimpleMind+, and a slew of others multiple times a week and at a time. And now with remote learning, I am having to convert my Explain EDU’s into MP4’s which my iPad handles pretty decently for being 4.5 years old. IMO, I am not using this device lightly. 

But I do get that I am not doing the computational lifting of a high end desktop that you may be referring to.