NCH Express Scribe is freely available to the public for commercial and residential use. I know many transcription companies and education systems use it. It works with most foot pedals as well. A good cheap foot pedal is the vPedal found at several online locations. Transcription software is pretty easy to write. I have written several transcription programs in the past with ease. For those of you who will ask, I do not work for NCH or any associated companies.

I haven't seen a benchmark from Apple or Microsoft for that matter that was truthful. I tend to look at non-OS sponsored benchmarks from companies who don't get paid to do the benchmark. If I want to purchase a PC, I don't rely on AMD or Intel's website to tell me which CPU is faster even though AMD shows Intel's CPUs as being faster in many areas.

Apple went out of their way to make their system run at optimal peek adding additional hard drives with raid and only showing the benchmarks that makes the Mac look good. If you go to http://www.apple.com/powermac/performance/ you will notice that in different benchmarks Apple doesn't show all the PC computers that were shown in previous benchmarks, only showing the PCs that were slower than the Mac.

As for benchmarks using Red Hat Linux, Red Had has been the most used flavor of Linux which looks good for Apple. But Red Hat deprecated that version of Linux about a year ago. Since then the newer versions of Linux running the newest kernel run between 20% and 60% faster on the same system depending on what you are doing.

As far as doing video rendering on the Mac with 14 hard drives using Raid, that alone can enhance the speed of a system by a lot, reducing the memory bottle neck of the hard drive. The "comparable" PC had only one hard drive running at 7200 RPMs.

The issue is not that one may be better than the other, but that Apple is fixing the race so they win.