These are new. The Macs are faster if you use regular Windows out of the box with all the bloat. But that's not what businesses do.

Put any kind of security software on the Mac and remove the bloat from Windows (normal for enterprises), and the Windows machines are faster.

You can blame the security software if you like, but you have to have it to carry insurance. And you have to have it to make a fair comparison anyway.

It's obvious that they will be faster. They come with a free video card at the same price point as the Macs that don't.

Which security software matters greatly. If its poorly optimized, and doesn't use Apple's framework it's going to perform terribly (SentinelOne is notorious for this) , and by default with smb on mac it will scan every single file modification over the network. If you're working with huge files over smb you have to disable packet signing, make sure the mac isn't writing and looking for .DS_Store, and make sure directory caching is turned on (its off by default).

Your experience is valid, I don't doubt that, but you can't just toss a mac into a windows optimized environment and expect it to work, you have to take that extra bit of time to do things differently.

Either way, sounds like you made the right choice then for your own org, but for the vast majority of companies introducing macs generally aren't a loss and tend to have a higher ROI.

Which security software do you recommend?

I'm going to run your recommendations through some research tomorrow. It would be so cool if we can get local file sharing to work, even Mac to Mac would be amazing.

We have directories with 30k+ large images and video content that we need to share. Macs can't open them.

Also, thanks in advance for any advice, if it works.