While it's nice to have a great machine for editing photos, or writing software, it's more a "nice to have". As long as you don't run out of RAM, most of the ti

While it's nice to have a great machine for editing photos, or writing software, it's more a "nice to have". As long as you don't run out of RAM, most of the time you aren't limited by CPU speed. And a lot of those tasks tend to be harder to parallelise, so having 12+ cores isn't a huge deal. Video editing is much more likely to be limited by CPU, and it parallelises nicely, so a better machine saves tonnes of time. Have a look at the current options Apple is putting out. If you need something that's cheaper than what Apple puts out, or something that's bleeding edge, then you're out of luck. This is especially true with video cards. Apple used to offer the best value workstations on the market. They got lazy, or maybe the Chinese / Taiwanese started undercutting IBM, Dell, and HP; which forced prices down to a point where Apple wasn't interested. And Apple doesn't have a very predictable upgrade cycle. If you're spending $5,000 on a machine, only to see the next version come out a few months later, it's not going to be very fun. Nor is holding off upgrades, because you just don't know if a new model is around the corner. Video requires a heap of grunt. Apple wasn't offering machines with enough grunt, or cheap enough machines. They looked at the cost of switching, vs the cost of sticking with Apple, and a lot decided to switch.