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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>I can't speak to the professional video world, but that's absolutely false in the professional audio world.

Depends on what you mean "professional audio world". If you mean heavy old style studios, the kind Led Zeppelin might have recorded on back in the day, yes, but these are on the go (profits and usage wise) anyway, as the industry shifts.

Musicians, producers, DJs, etc most carry laptops and have home studios based around them, and most use MacBook Pro's for their stuff (as evident in all kinds of interviews and live scenarios).

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I was referring to the composition and post production (sound design, engineering) world. Mostly because that is the industry I worked in for many years and still continue to work in (much more sporadically these days).

That's a world that was dominated by Mac Pros around 2010. Around 2013 I started seeing a shift, myself included, to custom built PC workstations and that trend is just increasing now. The initial switch, I believe, started with the lackluster cylinder Mac Pro, but continued due to the obvious failings in the Mac desktop market.

You speak of home based studios using MacBook pros, but anyone doing that is obviously not a professional. I will give you the fact that many DJs are using MacBooks for the mobile rigs, but at home, anyone actually doing professional audio work is likely using a massive powerful workstation or a number of PCs (master/slaves).

This notion that MacBooks (or even laptops in general) are super popular in the professional audio world is fiction made for advertising.

>You speak of home based studios using MacBook pros, but anyone doing that is obviously not a professional.

Tons of musicians/producers/etc have those, while making more money than professional studios from their productions -- and not just in EDM.

Lots of the work that studios did for even superstar musicians (pop, etc), nowadays happens in the box, and not just demos and early sketches.

>This notion that MacBooks (or even laptops in general) are super popular in the professional audio world is fiction made for advertising.

Rather the professional audio world is not what it used to be.

I'd consider million-making Bjork or whatever working on their laptop, as equally (or more) professional than some struggling studio or post-processing facility.

That's more a case of the MacBook Pro being "good enough" and Apple, and PC manufacturers too for that matter, have successfully segmented the market (with things like ports). Even Macworld will tell you these days that "whether you choose a Mac or PC for music production is largely down to the platform you prefer and who you’re collaborating with. There’s little inherent advantage to using Macs, beyond familiarity with the system, and the general robustness of the hardware" [1].

[1] http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/mac-software/best-mac-maki...

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