I suddenly felt the old Amiga fanboi inside of me pop up... :-)
At one time, up to at least 1996 the fastest Mac for running Photoshop, was not a Macintosh at all, but an Amiga tricked out with a graphics card and a CPU upgraded from the standard 68020 or 68040 to Motorolas last entry in the 68k line, the 68060. (Roughly equivalent to a Pentium - a bit slower clock but slightly more powerful instructions.)
How could this be? Photoshop 4 used 68k instructions, and the fastest 68k based Mac was the Quadra with the 68040 CPU. The first PowerMac was released in 1994, but it had to emulate the 68k to run Photoshop, which had a serious performance hit. Once Photoshop was released for the PowerPC, this anomaly ended.
(And Photoshop on Windows must have been faster than both Amiga and Mac pretty much immediately, but if I recall correctly it wasn't as capable on Windows right then. Or maybe people used to working on Macs for magazines etc just weren't prepared to switch platforms on a whim.)
So, Amiga was the original Hackintosh. :-)
But the copyright situation was even thornier then - to start the emulator you'd have to copy ROM images from a real Mac, and the only legal way to do that was to buy a Mac.
(Not that anybody did that, they just copied the ROM onto a floppy.) I think the preferred emulator was Shapeshiter. It worked remarkably well because most Macintosh programs did not use any direct hardware access but used the Apple provided official APIs.
Another anomaly was that Amiga was dead as a commercial gaming target by then, and so did not receive a port of Doom - but you could run the Macintosh version of Doom:
Earlier, there was even an older Mac emulator for the Amiga which tried to go the legal route by having a little hardware board you could put Mac ROMs into. (And then of course people copied the original ROMs and put them on EPROMs.)
Edit:
the same CPU upgrade almost happened to 68030 based Macs:
Remarkable. Today the fastest Mac is also a hackintosh, so some things have not changed so much.
That said, the first PowerPC Macs shipped in March of 1994 and Photoshop 3.0 for Mac in November. While the application was not native, a number of the filters were, so depending on what you did, they could be faster. Photoshop 4.0 was indeed fully native (November 1996).
At one time, up to at least 1996 the fastest Mac for running Photoshop, was not a Macintosh at all, but an Amiga tricked out with a graphics card and a CPU upgraded from the standard 68020 or 68040 to Motorolas last entry in the 68k line, the 68060. (Roughly equivalent to a Pentium - a bit slower clock but slightly more powerful instructions.)
How could this be? Photoshop 4 used 68k instructions, and the fastest 68k based Mac was the Quadra with the 68040 CPU. The first PowerMac was released in 1994, but it had to emulate the 68k to run Photoshop, which had a serious performance hit. Once Photoshop was released for the PowerPC, this anomaly ended.
(And Photoshop on Windows must have been faster than both Amiga and Mac pretty much immediately, but if I recall correctly it wasn't as capable on Windows right then. Or maybe people used to working on Macs for magazines etc just weren't prepared to switch platforms on a whim.)
So, Amiga was the original Hackintosh. :-)
But the copyright situation was even thornier then - to start the emulator you'd have to copy ROM images from a real Mac, and the only legal way to do that was to buy a Mac.
(Not that anybody did that, they just copied the ROM onto a floppy.) I think the preferred emulator was Shapeshiter. It worked remarkably well because most Macintosh programs did not use any direct hardware access but used the Apple provided official APIs.
Another anomaly was that Amiga was dead as a commercial gaming target by then, and so did not receive a port of Doom - but you could run the Macintosh version of Doom:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spHpv3NKQhI
Earlier, there was even an older Mac emulator for the Amiga which tried to go the legal route by having a little hardware board you could put Mac ROMs into. (And then of course people copied the original ROMs and put them on EPROMs.)
Edit:
the same CPU upgrade almost happened to 68030 based Macs:
https://lowendmac.com/2016/cpus-motorola-68060/