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 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.

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.