Yeah this is also why you see things like Reaper moving to linux and Bitwig debuting on Linux as well as mac and windows. With the future of mac and windows desktop computing up in the air I suggest that linux is the future for pro audio computing rather than apple.
I use Windows on my primary computer to run Cubase, on my slave PC's to run Vienna Ensemble Pro, and a Mac to run Pro Tools for hosting picture. Many composers -- Hans Zimmer, for example -- run a very similar setup. Windows is quite common, especially in the film/game/TV scoring world.
macOS is an absolutely wonderful OS for audio work, and in a vacuum is my favorite OS (due in no small part to Core Audio/MIDI), but given the amount of power that we need and the lack of replaceable hard drives, PC's are pretty much always the better way to go nowadays if you're using a desktop. For laptops, though, I'd still nearly always recommend a MBP.
Joel Zimmerman, aka Deadmau5. You might see a macbook sitting on stage once in a while, but saying that he uses it to do his production would be no more accurate than saying he uses his watch to control the lights (he actually uses racks of nvidia GPUs)
The pro-audio software market is significantly tilted towards Windows. The split is approximately 75/25. Also, the majority of the "pro"-audio market is not working professionals. In fact, they're a vanishingly small piece of the equation. That's true for pretty much any creative pro-sumer market. Most of the money is in the long tail of people that want to be like pros, not in the tiny number of actual professionals.
Source: I've worked in pro-audio for a long time, both independently and as an employee for one of the largest companies in the space.
Low-latency real-time audio streaming, for example, is a very common need, and the developers need to consider the same problems mentioned in the article.
This used to be fairly true but seems to be less so these days. The lack of an affordable Mac with reasonable power in the lineup for quite a while (plus the quality control issues with the new MBPs) has led to quite a lot of musicians on the lower end of the earnings spectrum to move to PC, while the lack of a high powered, expandable pro Mac has pushed some high end users towards Windows, at least for parts of their workflow.
I’ve anecdotally heard similar things about the video editing world - people would love to use Macs, but Apple took far too long to release the new Pro (and now it’s here, it’s out of reach for many “pro” users who don’t have unlimited budgets), so they had no choice but to move to Windows.
I worked in a studio (with 8 work spaces and a Dante network) and there was no single Apple machine. Of all the musicians I know maybe two use Apple, most use Windows.
The whole “musicians use Apple”-thing is really not true — at least in my subjective sample size.
I used to work for a well-known audio plugins company (if you're a musician, you've heard of this company) and 70% of our customers were Mac users (that was back in 2016).
