It was incredibly alarming that the author blamed OSX on slow SMB performance and neglected to say which version of SMB they used. OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion) only

It was incredibly alarming that the author blamed OSX on slow SMB performance and neglected to say which version of SMB they used. OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion) only defaults SMB v1, where as Windows 8 defaults SMB v3. SMB v1 is incredibly chatty and has typically has bad performance over high latency networks (in other words the very 802ac network they were testing). And SMBv3 solves that problem altogether. So it's no wonder Windows 8 was faster. If the author bothered to do additional testing with iperf (like in http://anandtech.com/show/7085/the-2013-macbook-air-review-13inch/9 http://anandtech.com/show/7085/the-2013-macbook-air-review-1...) then they would get completely different results.