Anyone that knows Apple history, knows that they software was never that great, remember they almost went bankrupt while trying to write a new OS.

Anyone that knows Apple history knows that they were the de facto standard in most graphics, audio, and video industries for decades due to their rock solid OS and driver support by 3rd parties in those fields - Adobe, Quark, Cubase, MOTU, AVID, Shake etc... There's a reason you saw so many Macbook DJs and fully Mac OS post-production houses.

Only in US and a few other countries with similar salary levels, the rest of the world has mostly used Windows versions of the same applications.

Remember the 10% market share in the 1990s did not cover all the related jobs across the planet.

And now with the demise of the workstation market, some studios have switched to Windows based workstations for their audio, graphics and visual effects gear instead of dealing with thunderbolt spaghetti.

Well it kind of did tbh. Adobe Illustrator 1.0 (1987), QuarkXPress (1987), and Adobe Photoshop 1.0 (1990) all launched as Mac-only software.

In 1991 Apple then launched QuickTime and FireWire was codified as a standard by 1995. They literally defined the software and firmware which made digital editing possible on a workstation in the 90s.

Adobe Premiere was architected around Quicktime. Avid alone held an estimated 80%+ market share in the professional broadcast, TV, and film industry and was exclusively Apple until mid-95. That's not in the US, that's Globally.

Apple then launched Final Cut and ended up capturing 49% of the U.S. professional editing market by the mid-2000s.

Here's a fun read and personal chronology

https://www.cined.com/apple-at-50-the-company-that-made-me-a...

Those softwares also existed on Windows, and there were plenty of countries in the 1990s with zero Apple presence on their markets.

In Portugal, there was a single shop in Lisbon, Interlog, in the days before Internet, required driving down to Lisbon, or flying from the Islands into mainland, to get those computers, at double the price of getting PCs, Amiga or Atari instead.

This in Europe, in other continents with lower income levels, it was already good enough to get their hands on PC clones.

Poor fellows, did not had any multimedia productions. /s

macOS/OS X is pretty solid, yes. Mac OS "Classic" (Version <= 9), though, was not nearly as stable. Classic is where most of the big names in media software started, though.

I mean it was good enough for the Beach Boys to record the first full-length albums recorded and assembled entirely in-DAW.

Macintosh NuBus computers (the early PPC stuff running System 7.5 onwards) took over completely from TimeLine WaveFrame as Pro Tools established istself in film audio and foley work. Think Toy Story onwards, or anything in Skywalker Sound from the mid 90s.

Pixar was mostly UNIX workstations, and since owned by Steve Jobs, a couple of NeXTSTEP alongside SGI.

Snow Leopard was the pinnacle of operating systems, it was just the best