I would say that is more about the boxes they use than CPU. The difficulty of adding your own hard drives, memory, graphics cards etc to a Mac is the biggest problem I think.

What pro task, really requires high single thread performance? I imagine Apple could match intel by simply using more cores on their ARM CPUs.

Audio from what I know is best with have multiple high speed cores, rather than many lower speed cores. (I use my machines for audio)

And what are your processing times like? I use my Mac for video editing, but I have never had any problems doing that smoothly even on much weaker Macs.

Only issue I have on Mac is compiling large programs.

The issue is with live streams of audio or virtual instruments with CPU heavy effects with very small amount of buffering (typically 64 samples @ 48kHz, which is 0.75ms). Also processing of instruments and effects for one track (+ relevant busses) has to be in series so more cores doesn't help a resource hungry signal chain. But of course they do greatly help overall effect/instrument count over many tracks.

True, I miss the old Powermac towers: Workstation class machines, but with low-end configurations for those of us on a budget. When I was faced with the choice between:

- an iMac that didn't really meet my needs

- a ridiculously unaffordable Mac Pro tower

I jumped over to Linux running on commodity PC hardware.

Oh good, I see the downvotes are rolling in now (I was concerned after receiving a wave of upvotes yesterday). I've found there is no more reliable method to collect downvotes on HN than to say something critical about Apple.