Thanks, Uarte. I appreciate the thoughtful response. I too, consider myself platform agnostic. I have a mixture of PCs, Macs and Linux. I have a four monitor spread (Apple Cinema Displays) and use Synergy to span my mouse and keyboard across them.
Yes, Windows 8, is definitely a work-in-progress. I find Metro nice in concept, but annoying in its current state.
But I think the unique distinction and strong-worded “betrayal” is fitting to Apple and Apple, alone. Because they did something unprecedented in the industry. They provided an end-to-end solution for creative and IT professionals, went out of their way to lock down that solution such that only their hardware could be used, and then proceeded to effectively pull the plug on the entire solution.
It wasn’t just the proprietary workstation-class hardware and its apps that “ended” without warning, it was their server-based solutions, and distributed network products that also ended without warning.
No business owner should be put in the position of having to invest in almost three year old hardware, that worse still, was at a premium price and under-performing from day one, and worse still, at that same premium price years later, and worst still, could have been a complete dead end – we didn’t know until Summer of 2013 that it was not the case!
Three years, in tech industry years, is a very, very long time. It’s tantamount to ending a platform.
It was not just a few months, it was years!
It was an outrageous position that Apple put many of us in. Few business owners in 2012 needing to grow by 10 or more workstation-class seats would have made a decision to not switch, lightly.
I’ll still buy Apple iOS devices and laptops (as bootcamp works very well), but won’t ever again invest in their workstation-class hardware, nor rely on any apps tied to that hardware.
That said, audio software wise, I still continue to hedge my bets in one small way: I won’t buy an audio plugin that’s PC-only. While it’s impossible for the PC hardware industry to “disappear” like Apple’s did, I still like the idea of having an Apple choice and safety net. For example, right now in fact, I have an old Mac Pro set up as a dedicated mastering chain.
Which btw, case-in-point: this perfectly fast enough hardware (a 2006 Mac Pro) will run the plugins I want for the chain (just), but because Apple has arbitrarily and artificially decided not to allow Mavericks to run on it (it does run if you hack around), I can’t install Slate Digital’s VBC because of a bug in the installer.
Should the VBC installer work on an OS three versions behind? Maybe.
But certainly Apple didn’t need to artificially prevent my Mac Pro from running the latest OS when it’s fully capable of doing so. In fact, part of the hack to get it to run (which I don’t have the inclination to try) is to edit a file that has the original “Mac Pro 1,1” identifier “blacklisted”! So frustrating, and very “Apple.”