I've been using Macs since 1985 and programming them, too. I work with Windows and Linux as well, but Macs have often been my "daily driver" - my first was an S

I've been using Macs since 1985 and programming them, too. I work with Windows and Linux as well, but Macs have often been my "daily driver" - my first was an SE, I had a PowerBook Duo, and then a Titanium PowerBook G4, and then a 2008 Mac Pro. The Mac Pro is still my "main" computer - four hard drives, rotating on-site and off-site backups. I used that machine for my photo library, for a big archival photo project with Aperture, for music recording with an Apogee Ensemble interface, for podcast production, for video production, to manage all my e-mail, to record and mix multi-track audio with Logic. I use a lot of command-line tools (via Homebrew, or compiling from sources). From my perspective Snow Leopard was the high point of reliability and functionality. I liked the concept of my computer with multiple monitors as a media hub. The way Apple has taken features away from successive versions of iMovie, and killed Aperture, and turned MacOS X increasingly into a walled garden, has been a huge turnoff for me. I have an old iPad and it's useful for watching videos and chatting on Twitter but I don't want or need iOS devices to _replace_ general-purpose computers. I didn't buy the cylinder Mac Pro because - call me crazy and old - I still want drive bays. I don't want to move all my work to a laptop (and as a guy who writes a LOT - hundreds of thousands of words a month - keyboard quality is pretty important to me). And I've never been interested in an iPhone. I don't have any interest in keeping all my documents in the "cloud" (psssttt -- the cloud is just other people's computers!) And I want my own DRM-free media to live on my own computer's drives such that no one can shut down a service or discontinue support and take it away from me. I don't want to "subscribe" to apps, but that's another story. Basically I'm no longer Apple's target audience, and it's frustrating. It's not really about cost for me, per se. It's about Apple's declining interest in the whole notion of general-purpose computers as open and unrestricted tools for creative people and allowing them to own and store their own files. I'm curious for the promised next-generation Mac Pro but I'm not too hopeful.