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As a semi-pro I tend to disagree with your reasons why Mac is better because 1) Tons of USB 3.0 audio interfaces work with Windows plug & play with <10ms latenc

As a semi-pro I tend to disagree with your reasons why Mac is better because 1) Tons of USB 3.0 audio interfaces work with Windows plug & play with <10ms latency (Focusrite comes to mind, Sweetwater lists a ton) that can be paired with any reasonable spec Windows laptop to be just as good and probably for less money [a], 2) Ableton Live and/or Reaper have been extremely solid in ways that yes Logic & ProTools also are solid, but this is a tie to me, and 3) Serious hardware goes back to #1 in that Windows actually has plenty of options that, let's be honest, a real serious Mac-based musician would invest in anyway. The gold standard UAD used to be Mac only but it's on USB 3.0 now so that kind of evens the field. I grew up with Macs, but when I learned how to manipulate PCs and, to the best of my ability, overcome a lot of the inherent issues. A lot has been budget oriented. VSTs and the like don't run on Mac, that cuts off an entire community! [a] Also there's ASIO4ALL which runs on a high grade machine pretty dang well - not Core Audio perfect, but it's surprisingly good in my experieince. Just needs like an i5, 8GB RAM and a decent HD (works great with SSDs).

S_A_P 10y ago
I dont think that contradicts my point. My point was that core audio will let your built in sound card run sub 10ms. To do that with windows, you could use ASIO4All, and I think it is a generally good solution. However, its a bolt on, and not part of the windows audio subsystem. I ran windows 7 on my mac pro and used a card with WASAPI enabled drivers and they still couldnt perform as well as the native ASIO driver(which is itself a bolt on to get around crappy Windows audio performance) Its not impossible, and PLENTY of people use windows for audio but saying that out of the box it performs as well as osx is disingenuous at best. USB 3.0 is only just now becoming available while lightning has been available for a while. Also, Mac runs/supports VST just fine, and having coded in both VST and AU APIs they are similar enough to make porting to either platform relatively trivial(though not fool proof).
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  Ah well I guess I'm off on the VST thing - hadn't been available at the time, still late XP early Win7 at the latest maybe? Honestly though using the guitar approach that I was favoring, even having native audio drivers wasn't my ideal "sound chain" approach - personally speaking - so I was pretty much destined to use an outside interface for modeling and whatnot, among other approaches. I wasn't an "out of the box" kind of person but understand why Mac has that particular advantage, but for my not-genuinely-pro under-the-hood level I could still tell PC had equal footing to do powerful things that are more defined by the skill of the user than the inherent capabilities or quality of the platform. Basically a wash, thus not really a Mac advantage except in a kind of narrow defined view, a good one though.

S_A_P 10y ago

I dont think that contradicts my point. My point was that core audio will let your built in sound card run sub 10ms. To do that with windows, you could use ASIO4All, and I think it is a generally good solution. However, its a bolt on, and not part of the windows audio subsystem. I ran windows 7 on my mac pro and used a card with WASAPI enabled drivers and they still couldnt perform as well as the native ASIO driver(which is itself a bolt on to get around crappy Windows audio performance) Its not impossible, and PLENTY of people use windows for audio but saying that out of the box it performs as well as osx is disingenuous at best. USB 3.0 is only just now becoming available while lightning has been available for a while. Also, Mac runs/supports VST just fine, and having coded in both VST and AU APIs they are similar enough to make porting to either platform relatively trivial(though not fool proof).

6stringmerc 10y ago
Ah well I guess I'm off on the VST thing - hadn't been available at the time, still late XP early Win7 at the latest maybe? Honestly though using the guitar approach that I was favoring, even having native audio drivers wasn't my ideal "sound chain" approach - personally speaking - so I was pretty much destined to use an outside interface for modeling and whatnot, among other approaches. I wasn't an "out of the box" kind of person but understand why Mac has that particular advantage, but for my not-genuinely-pro under-the-hood level I could still tell PC had equal footing to do powerful things that are more defined by the skill of the user than the inherent capabilities or quality of the platform. Basically a wash, thus not really a Mac advantage except in a kind of narrow defined view, a good one though.