@Jalcide - I hear you, and I have some friends that took Apple’s actions (or non-actions) as hard as you did following the Final Cut fiasco. But I respectfully disagree with you about the magnitude of the “betrayal” in this case.
I used to to be a Mac user – something I don’t discuss regularly on this or other forums since it’s been such a long time – and at that long-lost time of yet another Apple “betrayal” I said “never again” to Apple. Well, here I am, back on Macs and totally enjoying them… The problem is not that Apple stopped supporting “pro” users. They didn’t. The weren’t about to. The problem was that they were so secretive about their plans that they created a PR problem, that many people interpreted as a sign of waning support for pros.
Now, I won’t disagree that their support on the surface for pros has became ambiguous, but let’s take a look at a few facts:
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The Mac Pro line of 2009-2012 was and still is pretty dang powerful. If you picked up an 8-core during that time, your music and audio production needs are still being met for almost any type of project requirements, starting with Nehalem CPUs, which initiated the current generations of CPU awesomeness. Those machines run Mavericks beautifully, and run Cubase, Pro Tools, etc., just great. Unless you need to create massive orchestral templates, they will still be fine, in which case, you’re already looking at VEPro anyway. I’ve personally benchmarked my Mac Pro 8-core against my much more recent Windows 6-core machine, and it is roughly comparable performance (within about 20%) on average latencies. On low latencies, the Windows 6-core machine will of course smoke the Mac 8-core, but for my types of projects, the 8 core Mac is more than adequate and does surprisingly well at low latencies too with RME hardware/drivers. And I own a business, so I am particular about getting my money’s worth. Yes, true that bang for the buck = Windows. However, there’s plenty of bang still in the aging Mac Pro platform for most music/audio guys for extremely large projects, no problem, as long as you went 8-core or higher. And again… there’s VE Pro when more is needed. And BTW, there’s no need to buy the new 2013 Mac Pros, at least for now. I expect in an iteration or two, the prices will come down, and things will change yet again. There is plenty of life left in other Macs (older Mac Pros, or current Macbook Pros, high-end iMacs, etc.) for music production to have to go and drop $3000-$9000 on a new 2013 Mac Pro that is more aligned with the video production pros than audio pros at this point. Although, time will tell…
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Apple was never going to abandon the “Pro” market, although the definition of what “pro” actually means is becoming irrelevant, or at least very blurry with many users. In any case, they were not about to lose their elite cache. They just didn’t handle the PR well as they publicly moved heavily into the consumer market. Many people overreacted, including many of my friends, swearing “never again” and here most of them are, still using Macs. You and a few of my friends decided to stick with Windows, and I absolutely understand that reasoning… having done so myself several years ago… before I started switching back after a long absence.
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Intel CPUs made a huge shift in 2009, and the iterations after that were mainly about power/performance ratio as opposed to just purely performance. So what we saw with CPU iterations was that a quad core of today could be slapped in a powerful laptop that competes with Xeon Mac Pros and Windows workstations of yesteryear. That also applies to iMacs and Mac Minis. The gap that emerged with the aging Mac Pro platform was indeed filled with top-of-the-line iMacs. As much as I hate to admit it, and as much as I hate the word “iMac,” some of my friends started buying these beautiful 27" iMacs and top-of-the-line Macbook Pros with nice current Core-i7 quad cores and could largely do what I could do on my custom Windows workstations. The CPU performance war has basically ended, in my view! There just isn’t a need for most composers/producers to get something more powerful than a current-gen quad core i7, a bucketload of RAM and a big SSD. The shift is almost complete, and most pro audio users can easily go that route and get all the power they need. For the fringe cases of people who actually do need more CPU power, there is VE Pro, which is already part of the workflow of many pros. Yes, the pendulum may shift once again for ever-more-greedy CPU-eating plugins, but for now, the CPU war is not that important, as long as you run a recent Core-i7. For those who want to get very technical, they can easily build a much more powerful Windows machine for less money. But we’re not talking a vast difference for business owners who look at 2-3year price structures and longer-term hardware investments.
So Apple’s slow response on the Mac Pro line really had several things impacting it… Apple’s insane secretiveness, poor PR to “pro” users, Intel’s shift of focus to power/performance CPU design, the fact that CPUs had basically caught up with pro audio needs somewhere in 2009-2010, and ultimately, a shift in the paradigm of computing anyway.
So in my view “betrayal” is too harsh a word. But I do understand the “sting” of it after so much time and money has been invested and people were left wondering what Apple’s real strategy was. This “betrayal” is really a communication problem intersecting with the crossroads of technology trends. Not nearly as dire, at least in retrospect, as many people proclaimed. And keep in mind such levels of “horror” stories can be told over and over again for Avid/Pro Tools users. Talk about platform, strategy, pricing and abandonment issues! Trust me, I run Pro Tools here too, and rely on it for business. No one, not even Apple, can come close to the drama with Avid, in my view.
In any case, I definitely do agree with you on some points – the most important being that I also no longer buy products that are on one platform only! That’s a great strategy. All the main apps and plugins I use now are cross-platform. That covers that platform base.
But more importantly, I have finally decided that the term “never again” really can’t apply to the technology industries today. This industry – and the the sub-industry of pro audio companies – has so many pressures on it, so many changes that sweep through, so many unpredictable variables, that I’ll “never again” say “never again.” Apple has its share of problems, but so do the other players, and what matters most to me, personally, is just having the right tools to get the job done today. If I could, I’d run my whole studio on Linux and be done with Microsoft AND Apple. However, I tried that many times, and I keep fairly current on Linux developments, as well as run a couple of Linux servers, but it just doesn’t cut it for pro audio work when all the best plugins, DAW apps, etc., only run on Windows and Macs. What little does run well on Linux is just, frankly, not what my clients want… so I’m stuck with Windows or Macs. 
Practicality and working with clients has trumped my higher ideals.
Anyway, I appreciate your point of view. You need the right tools for your projects and peace of mind, and your current configuration works best for you. Best of luck with that, and may our paths cross again! Here’s to making great music with all these amazing tools!