I use MacOS, these days, mostly for writing (occasional coding) and on the go editing on macbook. Nice example of what you've mentioned is Fade In Pro http://www.fadeinpro.com/ which filled vacuum left by impotent Final Draft (this is changing now with FD 10 slightly). It's just GREAT that you can use the same application in all three environments. In case of Fade In Pro you don't even have to buy separate licenses.

With Windows we can more or less hope customers can use a more mixed variation of hardware and get ok results. With Linux, it's unlikely we'd be able to let people go it alone.

I would love to leave Windows completely, but I need Ableton Live to work. Microsoft have completely lost what little goodwill I had towards them with Windows 10 and it's spying.

In the 90s as I was buying I actually was going to go with BeOS and had a Tascam DX2424 external hard drive recorder (Thing was awesome). Steinberg, as I was a week away from buying my first Apple computer, pulled the plug on BeOS applications. I went Windows NT Nuendo 1.0. 80% of the studios my size were all ProTools. I HATED ProTools and their hardware lock in.

After a while I kind of got a niche going and I would also work at mixing or engineering things at Apple based studios about once a month. I have always had the unfortunate luck of making every single Mac crash while I use them. I would speak about my frustration and the "Mac Guy" would shake his head and say I don't know as I would have to redo hours of work.

Later on in Video. I would be on Premier or Final Cut Pro and the same thing would happen where I was in the middle of hours long sessions and I would get some crash that wouldn't lose me work anymore but it got me out of "The Zone." If you ever did major video editing you know what that feels like. The Apple "crash" was different because sometime it would take a while to realize that while I have the video gui up what I was doing wasn't actually changing anything, or I couldn't grab a clip from a folder and import it OR the codex just isn't working so I can't see a preview and I would have to reboot.

I hate Apple software like Final Cut Pro because they use their own vocabulary. It was always not the standard vocabulary of the industry pre-digital nor what the other video/audio world was using.

Software Synths (Windows/Linux) seem to just work for me these days. My buddies swear with their Macs they can do the same things and then boom back to sampled sythns after a month or so due to "little issues" but they would never blame their machines or OS. I have noticed a ton more Windows in music performance the past year or two, but I really think that Linux could make a niche in live audio production a reality if the Native Instruments would provide a Linux port.

Non-Apple world is pretty ripe for Apple to lose massive market share like they are seeing the last 3 years in video.

How different the world would be today if that had happened.

Pentium II at 300 mhz has more videos playing then most computers could play today https://youtu.be/Qv6twfh2SgI?t=2m30s

The thing was you could unplug the computer by pulling the cord out and boot up and everything would immediately play where you stopped.

I can confirm anecdotally that this occurred with a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010). Despite claims that Apple hardware is reliable and holds its value, I'll never buy one of their personal computers again.

I have a 2008 Mac Pro that is still incredibly reliable, but I am starting to feel the need for a new computer for music production. And it doesn't look like they will even support the 2008 Pros with the next OS release.

I miss Snow Leopard -- Logic on Snow Leopard was an incredibly solid platform for music production!

I'm contemplating whether it might be possible to do all my music work on Mac Minis. I really like having four hard drives and a tower case...

Yearly? I know multiple people who need to get their 2011 MacBook Pro motherboard replaced on a monthly basis. One managed to make Apple give in and swap it for an equivalent 2015 model, and the others are still trying…

Instead they actively expended money making it fundamentally worse, and not just that but making it a zero-sum game. Many people correctly compared the Cylinder (it's hard to resist the more colloquial in our office "trashcan mac") MP to the old Cube in terms of basic thermal and design tradeoffs, but the Cube never inspire active dislike because there was still the MP. On the contrary the small niche of users that actually found its set of tradeoffs worth it had a soft spot for a long time. Nobody lost anything at all from the existence of the Cube, so the only people who got were those fine with it, and anyone else could just look from afar. By making the neoCube the only thing though Apple shot any hope of that.

And the Cylinder was form over function in a way I can't recall from Apple in a very long time, and also seemed a fundamental misreading of what they're good at and what they want to be actively engaged in. The mirror of an easily expandable pro friendly system offering flexibility on user side is that it also provides flexibility on the manufacturer side: because 3rd parties can do more entirely on their own, the manufacturer in turn can get away with doing less because the gaps can be filled in by the market. The more control a manufacturer takes for themselves, the more responsibility falls on their shoulders in turn, which is why command-and-control economics tends to have scalability problems vs approaches that make more use of markets.

At any rate it's a real bummer. I've looked at Xeon hackintosh efforts but that's definitely getting into pretty shaky territory and with Apple abandoning pro systems themselves support is probably only going to get worse. I agree it is time, probably past time, to start planning to abandon the platform but boy will it be painful (closer to 25 years in my case).