It's the OS. CoreAudio is native to macOS/iOS and very stable. The latency is low and most of the time you don't need to install anything: just plug an USB. It

It's the OS. CoreAudio is native to macOS/iOS and very stable. The latency is low and most of the time you don't need to install anything: just plug an USB. It even provides APIs for running the plugins, if the DAW wants to use AU. Hell, even the built-in interfaces has good latency on Macs. Also, if you have multiple, different branded interfaces, Apple provides a tool to "merge them" so your DAW pretends it's only one. On Windows you need an alternative third-party driver solution, ASIO, just to get proper latency. Microsoft tried DirectAudio, Kernel Audio, among other tech, but it never worked and/or never caught on. Even ASIO is not as stable as CoreAudio and requires installing (sometimes unstable) third-party driver software and control panels. IME, sometimes those drivers conflict with each other, so you can't use multiple soundcards at the same time, or swap them. Most people eventually get there, but it still feels like a house of cards. There's a lot of small studios that choose Hackintoshes, so it's not really the hardware, although M1 might change that, who knows.