Film composers. Absolutely absurd track counts, plus usually working in quad or 5.1. A majority of the big ones have long since moved to using multiple Windows machines, but most of them did so begrudgingly. For a long time, the usual choice was a Mac Pro, but the Xeons were never a great choice from a processing standpoint -- they just enabled the massive amounts of RAM needed for said absurd track counts, though ECC was an unnecessary added expense. Musicians tend to prefer macOS for a variety of reasons, and the Mac Studio is a breath of fresh air, finally giving us something we actually need.

That said, the Mac Studio still doesn't quite enable everything to be loaded on one machine, so the PC farms are still in use; worse, the primary software used to utilize those PC farms, Vienna Ensemble Pro, isn't yet Apple Silicon native, so...for the time being, the Mac Studio still isn't quite ready for prime time. The Apple Silicon Mac Pro would likely enable finally moving to using a single machine running macOS with the CPU performance and amount of RAM needed, so you best believe that film composers will move to it in droves once it comes out, whatever the price, as VEP being native or not will no longer be a factor.

Source: was a fairly successful film composer myself until I developed an ear condition called Hyperacusis, now working as a programmer writing custom tools for my peers, and as a tech consultant designing their rigs.

It absolutely was for a long time. There’s a number of studios that even still have old PowerMac and cheese grater Intel towers chugging along in some capacity, and audio professionals were among the loudest to protest the “trash can” Mac Pro’s lack of expansion slots.

I’m still using a 2012 max pro upgraded to 2x 6 core 3.6ghz and 128gb ram.

I have 12tb of storage, nvme ssd and an optical burner!

I’ve put this machine together over a few years and total cost is 3k Aud.

They’re still great value, this machine can still run drivers for hardware from 2005 (with FireWire!). I can run any os from snow leopard to big sure. I can put a Thunderbolt card in it. I can put most GFX cards.

I have a laptop for my performances, but in the studio, this thing is a beast and I hope it works for quite a few more years as a replacement will be very expensive.

I would imagine it is at least a segment. While real-time audio is possible in Linux and other BSD aside from MacOS, the frustration comes when wanting to work with proprietary software. Since around Windows 10 many people have been satisfied with the latency of a beefy enough system, but an i5/8gb 2015 era Mac will still run real-time, inter-application as well as aggregate audio devices flawlessly. If you ever tried to work with audio in Windows leading up to this point... yeah. Anyway Bitwig is awesome and runs in Ubuntu with cheap PC hardware! Now if we could just get Native Instruments involved. Most class-compliant USB interfaces work in Ubuntu in my experience.