patrick.net

Got my first Mac in 1985. I had several working continuously ever since, but I sold the last of my MacBooks two weeks ago.

I was one of the original early adopters. I was paying my way through school doing audio recording and music composition on the side. I was one of the first Sound Tools 1.0 owners in the world. They renamed version 3.0 as "Pro Tools". That first version was a train wreck, but I stuck with it. Mac was always first with 2D graphics, sound, and video editing for pros. Not 3D...Apple was like Adobe in that regard...they never understood the third dimension.

A month ago, I plugged two different Macintosh-only Thunderbolt Audio Interfaces into two of my D.I.Y., 8-core PC's, downloaded some untested beta drivers... and they worked! Screaming fast, hardware accelerated 196khz 24 Bit audio, uncompressed in Windows 10 Pro.

I contacted six different pro audio and video hardware/software companies and ALL of them gave me Windows license keys for my mac versions at no charge.

So that is that. No more Macs.

And don't think I'm a clueless hold-over. I own six other PC's as well. Two of them have triple 1080 GeForce SLI's. It's just that in professional audio and video. Latency matters entirely.

Apple let their advantage get away from them. Quite recently. The drivers are still in beta for most of the manufacturers, but I'll lay big money down that the Cupertino boys don't know what a significant event it is that I am mixing a hardware accelerated 60 track piece to uncompressed 4K HD on my Windows Box tonight.