CoreAudio is native to macOS/iOS and very stable. The latency is low and most of the time you don't need to install anything: just plug an USB. It even provides APIs for running the plugins, if the DAW wants to use AU. Hell, even the built-in interfaces has good latency on Macs. Also, if you have multiple, different branded interfaces, Apple provides a tool to "merge them" so your DAW pretends it's only one.
On Windows you need an alternative third-party driver solution, ASIO, just to get proper latency. Microsoft tried DirectAudio, Kernel Audio, among other tech, but it never worked and/or never caught on. Even ASIO is not as stable as CoreAudio and requires installing (sometimes unstable) third-party driver software and control panels. IME, sometimes those drivers conflict with each other, so you can't use multiple soundcards at the same time, or swap them. Most people eventually get there, but it still feels like a house of cards.
There's a lot of small studios that choose Hackintoshes, so it's not really the hardware, although M1 might change that, who knows.
I think you're right that legacy, mindshare/knowledge etc played a big part in it, and I'm sure Windows is much better with this stuff now. Although the handful of studios I've been to in the last few years were still running Macs, but again maybe that's just mindshare.
A funny thing I realized recently while trying to setup OBS for video conferencing on my Mac at home (I work as a teacher occasionally): There is no way out of the box to capture system audio, you either need to do it through external hardware or use a hacky solution like Loopback. On Windows, this "just works".
In other words, you and OP may both be right. Three absolutely massive transitions at apple between your era and theirs: hardware, software and management quality.
Your bad luck was that you bailed out of the MacOS audio subsystems just when they started to get good.
Any user who needs to perform audio with any computer will need a soundcard in order to have any sort of decent quality, for #1 Decent quality inputs and outputs #2 The correct input and output types like XLR (or fibre optic or whatever) #3 Acceptable latency for live performance.
Soundcards are available for mac or windows, the makers provide drivers which deal with the "Audio and MIDI stacks". From a users perspective theyre both fine. After that, you care about the machines performance, CPU, how much RAM, how fast is the RAM, how fast is the SSD.
MS tried a bunch of tech in the past (WinMM, MCIWnd, DirectSound, WaveOut, WASAPI, XAudio2, etc), but none of them ever worked for professional Audio.
The proper solution was always to use ASIO, which is third-party technology by Steinberg. It works but it's not integrated with Windows: it goes directly to the audio interface, bypassing stuff in the Kernel.
This bypass causes some limitations, such as not being able to use the system mixer (which prevents from using media players or multiple audio apps), or sometimes having different audio-interfaces not work well with each other.
There are workarounds to those issues, but they have to be handled by the interface manufacturer when writing the drivers. Also, you can't have low-latency with built-in soundcard unless you use something like ASIO4ALL, which is not super stable IME. This sucks when you want to work on-the-go with headphones.
Of course, it can be very stable when you use the right combination of DAW, drivers and sound interfaces, but when you don't you have problems.
On macOS and iOS? CoreAudio is native and it has super low latency by default. It's mostly plug and play and all apps use it. It even provides APIs to use Audio Plugins or reroute Audio, so DAW writers don't even have to write it themselves (unless they want to). Do you have multiple Audio/MIDI interface? In macOS there's a built-in app to "link" them together.
Mac Minis are relatively cheap. Not much different in cost to comparable, branded, ultra-small-form-factor PC hardware. (And now, with the M1, I don't think you'll find competitive PC hardware in the same price range and form factor at all)
I agree that it is at least super competitive on pricing with comparable compact HP/Dell/Lenovo 8-core desktops. This was surely not true before M1 (I'd say on the order of 2x improvement in mini price-performance).
I suspect this will remain true for a at least a little bit more since Ryzen 5xxx are beasts too, and once supply-demand gets more balanced, machine prices will likely come down at or slightly below Mac mini M1.
On the laptop side, however, M1 is glorious and way cheaper than performance-matching alternatives.
[1] https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/7814504/HP-Pavilion-T...
But having run music on Windows for a long time, I would never ever go back. The telemetry, random updates, and general awfulness of the user experience are not something I want in my life.
MacOS has issues, not least the breaking changes in Catalina and Big Sur. But when each OS iteration settles down it's generally super-stable and - most importantly for professional use - it doesn't get in the way.
Indeed, the whole point of Apple buying Logic (and discontinuing the Windows releases) was that they needed a DAW on MacOS to get audio professionals to consider the OS. People don't remember this any more, but the Apple versions of Logic were very much inferior to the Windows versions.
I hate to be that guy, but your entire comment is full of wrong.
Firstly, Emagic "Logic" started on the Atari and Mac OS platforms. I'm not sure when it appeared on Windows, but it certainly wasn't a Windows first DAW. The Apple versions of Logic were never "very much inferior" to the Windows versions. In fact, it was the other way around.
> Indeed, the whole point of Apple buying Logic (and discontinuing the Windows releases) was that they needed a DAW on MacOS to get audio professionals to consider the OS.
The fact of the matter is, practically all "audio professionals" of the time period of which you refer, used Apple computers - either for MIDI sequencing, or Digital Audio Workstations. Windows computers weren't even a serious consideration. Those who didn't, still used Ataris, or hardware sequencers/recorders.
Pro Tools, originally by Digidesign, was Mac only for years also.
Today, most Hollywood composers use Cubase, which was definitely Windows-first. TV productions favor Studio One, which again, was Windows-first (and from the same developers as Cubase). Pro Tools is industry standard for Hollywood movies...but it didn't become the standard until version 6, running on Windows. Ableton Live, which is the most popular tool for recording live music, was written first on Windows (but originally commercially released simultaneously for Windows and Apple).
And Logic on Mac was very much inferior to Logic on Windows, which is why Windows was the preferred platform for running Logic. The Mac version didn't become better than the Windows version until version 6, for which there was no Windows version. While all accounts say that Logic is a great DAW these days, because it's Mac-only, the only production companies that run Logic are ones that are exclusively Mac-based.
I want to be charitable, and hope you're getting confused about the "Apple" versions - in that, you're conflating when Apple (the company) bought Emagic Logic, for when Logic (the software) was available on Apple Mac OS?! Either way, doesn't make your former statements any less incorrect.
The Atari ST Cubase 1.0 would like to dispute this. I remember sulking because it wasn't available for my Amiga.
Windows version didn't come until 1992, the Atari and Mac versions were released before that (Mac before Atari, however, the precursor by the same company was developed for Atari first).
Logic Pro is, of course, Mac-only as it's made by Apple.
We're not talking about an organization moving to Windows here, we're just talking about a single, appliance-like keyboard-input-to-audio-output computer for someone to play music on in a live Broadway show. TFA writes about buying the machine new for that single purpose. There aren't really "switching costs" in the traditional sense in that circumstance.
TBH I think it's just an ad. The circumstance (we have to buy two brand new computers for every run of a show!) and claimed impact are just too contrived.
EDIT: Further supporting the idea that it's just an ad, every other post from this domain on HN is promoting a product.
1. We use Macs because we need MainStage for these shows. 2. Mac mini fits the form factor. 3. Faster Mac mini means we can do cooler stuff.
Easy.
This is to suggest that Broadway shows could already have achieved the same increase-in-sound-quality-per-dollar by switching to cheaper hardware running Windows, and that the M1 introduction isn't really the big sea change the author makes it out to be.