This is the same point that’s often made about developers. But if it’s not developers and it’s not music producers, what is the large market for Macs that dwarfs everything else? And are they at least getting the products and features they want?
I just tried switching from my MBP to a Surface Laptop, and the bullshit that win 10 makes you deal with is just insane O_O
Alas I took the MBA back and got a refund and grabbed my spare Thinkpad T440 out of the cupboard and put windows 10 on it. The OS is a shell to run Chrome, Excel, Word, Putty, iTunes, kicad, LTspice, WSJTX and I use Fastmail for mail. Literally nothing gets in my way. It just works. And everything like photos and videos are in FILES not weird opaque containers and buggy as crap apps. The CPU is about the same speed, I've got more RAM in this, it's got a FHD display which is good enough and the keyboard is amazing compared to anything Apple had to offer. Plus it cost me literally 1/5th of the cost.
Also comparing OSX to windows, you can actually mostly drive windows from the keyboard without resorting to hand warping shortcut combinations reminiscent of Megadrive Streetfighter cheat codes.
I think after switching back I just had stockholm syndrome.
I've been using Windows 10 more and more over the last 2 years. Its fine. For the first time in a long time I don't feel like Windows is slowing me down, especially now it has sub-system for linux. Its still annoying that processes can lock access to files... but thats small potatoes.
As a long-time Win user, having wrist pain, this is the killer thing for me. Everything about a Mac feels extremely unergonomic to me. Many things are not doable from keyboard at all. AFAIU most of the Mac developers do all stuff with touchpad so they don't care though.
It focuses the menubar, at which point you can navigate the menus by typing/arrow key, Spacebar to focus, and Enter to select.
It helps me avoid a lot of mouse usage.
...come to think of it, I should probably give that a binding on my ErgoDox somewhere.
Only complaint is you have to actually enable Full Keyboard Access from system preferences before you can use the keyboard to do things like select buttons in dialog boxes.
https://gist.github.com/jakub-g/e893ffa9e91d08c6098966080978...
I’ve actually been thinking about writing a keyboard assistant using the accessibility API. In theory it should be easy to drive anything that’s built using UIKit.
Afaik, Windows is perfectly fine for casual users.
Apart from updates needing restarts and windows being inconvenient for programming, I don't see any clear disadvantages of using windows.
[1] I left about a decade ago when I saw where things were headed with iOS-ification of the platform in general. I'm a developer so I feel/felt your pain as a member of one of the groups Apple used to care about. I moved to Linux which I know is no help to you... power user/pro audio features and software on Linux are still lacking.
[0] - https://supercollider.github.io/
[1] - https://puredata.info/
The hardware budget from my employer also helps.
For you perhaps. I've used desktop/laptop linux for nearly 20 years and it works just fine, millions of others do too.
Developer tooling is really damn nice and using the command line is a joy. With proton on steam I can play a lot of the games I like.
But no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't get sound to work properly. I'm using a FiiO E10K and a pair of Sennheiser HD650 and no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't get it to sound right. I tried editing whatever configuration file I could find and I still couldn't get it to sound not choppy. Eventually I gave up and went back on windows. Maybe when I'll change my amp I'll give it another try.
I'm glad it's working for you though.
The Mac user experience is great in part because Apple is willing to compromise on backwards compatibility. This allows them to innovate in the user interface (which Microsoft also does) while at the same time keeping it relatively consistent, which is what Microsoft is prevented from doing.
Also, since Apple relies on selling directly to consumers, they really have to prioritise the user experience.
And here's your MP3 player, iTunes...
For real work on the road I use my t410s and ubuntu (although the hinge has now gone, which is a right pain), but most of the time I do real work I'm at home and use my z440 HP workstation (also with ubuntu)
There are legitimate reasons to buy macs, but I'd say most people want them because they look nice and they consider them a status symbol.
Hipsters?
https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2019/2/7/pro-tool...
Yes. A specialist system integrator can sell you a Windows machine with reliable low-latency audio performance and modern components. A lot of people can make do with a 2013 Mac Pro and don't want to deal with the inconvenience of switching; plenty of others have switched because they simply can't tolerate working on a machine with an Ivy Bridge processor and a maximum of 64GB of RAM.
I have worked in environments where vendors actually give a proper legally binding guarantee that Windows boxes work as expected and they charge accordingly.
When you sell packaged software you'd better make sure it runs with the next version of the OS. All registered Apple software developers have access to beta software, including OSs, for a very long time before launch, precisely to prevent things like this.
The trouble with the beta was it wasn't exactly the same as what shipped which caused delays of several months in most instances.
Edit: I could only find articles from 3rd party sources - NI did not release the statement on their website, but through their newsletter. For example it is mentioned here: https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/critical-co...
Also, I said "from memory [...] last year" but it was 2015! Wow, time flies! :-O