Unable to decide between PC and Mac

Thank you for the details.
I have not checked a vendor like the one you pointed because I was not looking to custom build, but I'll check if they have recommendations for PL.

I do not do any paid work. Mostly hobby and covering some charity events. When I cover events, there are usually a few hundreds of photos to process, sometimes up to 1500. Right now, I process about 300 a day over few days.

Mobility is not an issue per se, but having a desktop's processing power in a laptop is tempting. When I travel though, I rarely process raw photos on laptop. It's mostly viewing JPEGs from the camera.

Thank you for the details.
I will explore non-Intel NUC machines.

Thanks bobn2.
I was not aware of those Linux versions. Not much to disagree with what you said there.

Both of you pretty much nailed down all relevant points.
I did upgrade my desktop myself over its 8-year life. I replaced memory, HDD with SSDs, a Wi-Fi card, etc.

In its current state it is stuck at the GPU upgrade restrictions you mentioned. It has room in the box but not enough power or cooling. If I could add a GPU, that would have solved my problems for another few years. I explored this option and got suggestions over at DPR few months ago. At the end, it was not easy and not worth the effort.

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Thanks, JACS
If it's few months old I am guessing you have a 13th Gen i7 processor with a GPU and decent memory, is that close?
Could you provide some stats on how long it takes to process photos in DXO, and the resolution/file size of your photos?

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Correct. THe T1000 is optimized for CAD and 3D rendering engineering apps like Solid Works. It is of little value for gaming or photo editing.

Only recently did DXO PL support Apple silicon natively. Through PL 5 the code ran through the Apple Rosetta emulator. DXO was very late in releasing their code in universal binaries that supported the Apple silicon. Adobe and Capture One supported the M1 natively within six months after the release of the first M1 back in 2020.

I gave up on a desktop several years ago - opting out for a top end MacBook Pro and a duel display setup in the office and simply un plug the displays and take it on the road. I needed the processing horsepower, but I also needed an equivalent setup for when I traveled to a customer facility so I had to have the laptop anyway. Given the customers I support require all code to be Unix/Linux based, that eliminates Microsoft PC. When I picked up my first Apple silicon laptop, I baselined the performance on some radar imaging application and the Apple silicon laptop out performed a very capable Linux workstation with with twice the memory.

Really sounds like a PC is a wiser financial choice for what you do. You don't really need what MAC will try and convince you to buy. Beef up a PC and it can shred through just about anything.

You're not going to be wrong either way, but unless you have some paid working reason to go apple, your buck just goes further in the PC world.

I just ran this through Pureraw Version 1.6 on my Au $800 mini-PC, 20MP file, 32 seconds.

I recently replaced my Zotac Magnus Intel i5-10400/RTX3060/32Gb Desktop with a Mac Mini M1 16Gb/1Tb.

Shockingly, the M1 performs about the same in photo editing tasks. I benchmarked darktable on both machines, and the M1 is significantly faster in CPU tasks, and slightly faster in GPU (OpenCL) tasks. While using 15W instead of 55W.

I have no issues whatsoever with Capture One and DxO, either, for my 26 MP files. Since I am surprisingly enamored with the M1, I briefly considered upgrading it to a fancier model. But, frankly, everything is running so fast and smoothly, there would be no point to that.

I've been building m own PCs for 20 years now, it's really very simple and you get exactly the machine you need, plus you can easily upgrade components as and when. My current system includes an AMD Ryzen 5900X, 64GB of ram and a Geforce 3060Ti, which allows me a bit of light gaming, as well as the option of supplying 10 bit graphics to the monitor for Photoshop (which not all graphics cards do).

I've got a hammer in my toolbox just like that. It's had 16 new handles, and 3 new heads. Best hammer I've ever owned.

Apple have killed the conventional PC with their M series processors, it’s just taking a little while for the corpse to stop twitching. Buying a PC now on the promise of its upgradeability is a mistake, as PC architecture will inevitably ape Apple’s and be unrecognisable in a few years; Intel’s current processor line will be toast and everything will have changed.

Get a Mac now and you’re getting a solid machine which will continue to outperform the competition for years, with all the benefits of a far better OS to boot.

I hear this kind of statements (facts! LoL) ever since the inception of computers. PowerPC running circles around x86 (until Apple changed to Intel CPUs), Windows only having 16 colors (until that guy from the AD agency discovered all of his images were unpacked first with a Windows computer before they were delivered to him), the effortless Mac OS (which makes me feel boxed-in), the list goes on and on (you'll probably can complete it better than I) but it all comes down to fanboyishm, just like this brand camera is 'better' than that brand.

It's personal preference at best