I agree with you wholeheartedly on the halo effect point. Without Logic and Final Cut, there’s no reason to not run Protools and Adobe Suite on a cheaper PC workstation.
I’m curious about your statement that professional-grade audio software had historically been a Mac-only affair. Is that really true? I was using some pretty serious audio production software in Windows as early as 2003. What kinds of software were Mac-only at that point?
As another reply took issue with, strictly was probably a bit overstated. Software support was a secondary issue vs hardware support. You simply did not have Windows drivers for many of the top audio interfaces or you had major stability issues that vendors would blame on Windows. Macs were really plug and play hardware-wise and putting together properly specced PCs to run hardware on a stable basis really made the cost of advantage of a PC questionable.
I’m curious about your statement that professional-grade audio software had historically been a Mac-only affair. Is that really true? I was using some pretty serious audio production software in Windows as early as 2003. What kinds of software were Mac-only at that point?