msmcleod
One of my work colleagues uses both Logic and Cubase on the Mac, and he's always complaining that every time Apple releases an OS update it ends up breaking either Logic or Cubase, and it takes up to a month before they sort it out.
Really? I keep seeing these claims, but can’t say I’ve ever seen that, nor has anyone I know who uses Macs for audio or video work. Sometimes it takes hardware manufacturers a few weeks to get out a driver, but that’s the same for WIndows as well. Or in M-Audio’s case anything up to a couple of years.
msmcleod
Also, Mac's seem to slow down over time for no apparent reason - and even a clean install of the OS makes no difference (I've heard some people say Apple do this deliberately to try to get you to upgrade your Mac, but I'm slightly dubious about this).
There’s a function in some of the phones to slow them down if the battery is low or aging and no longer delivering full current to avoid the phone shutting down due to not enough power left. Not in Macs though, especially ones that don’t even have a battery. If Macbooks have a battery life problem it’s that the i7 ones drain the battery fairly quickly if pushed hard, say around 8 hours life compared to around 10 if used for less demanding stuff. They’re more of a portable computer than a “use it all day” laptop.
msmcleod
My Mac Mini is an Intel Core Duo running at 2.4 GHz with 8Gb RAM, and my old Dell Core Duo @ 2Ghz laptop with 4Gb Ram wipes the floor with it (both on Windows and Ubuntu). I recently put an SSD in my Mac with a clean install of High Sierra, and although the boot time improved significantly, it's still slow as hell doing anything else.
The mini’s OK for what it’s intended to do - as a media server, file server, internet browser or for office work. For DAW work it’s not so good. As for SSDs they improve file access times and drive throughput and also speed up paging to the swap file, but that’s it. They’re also impervious to shock damage and draw little power which makes them good options in laptops and being silent makes them useful in DAWs.
msmcleod
The worst I've ever seen on a PC is Windows Update messing around with drivers - re-installing the drivers has fixed things.
I could give you a list of the problems I’ve found with Windows from 3.11 onwards, including quite expensive software becoming unusable, but it would be a long list....
msmcleod
All the Mac users I've spoken to say they just don't bother with updates unless they have to in order to keep their system stable... so no difference from PC users then!
I’ve never seen any problems caused by Mac updates between the roughly annual major OS updates, and the big ones usually only have problems while some third-party hardware people catch up. I generally install the updates between those as they turn up, though I check what they are doing first to be on the safe side. In the commercial world it’s quite common to be using very old OS releases simply because there’s been the time to thoroughly check them for potiential issues and the fear of custom business-critical software becoming unusable is very real.
Setting time aside to train people in a new OS of software version is also a factor, as is how long it takes users to get up to speed on the new stuff. All of which has cost implications. In the audio world the cost in downtime when switching software is one reason Pro Tools became the “industry standard”.
The downside of that approach is things like a major UK government department’s central office being massively hit by the Blaster worm three years after MS released the fix for it. Which is why MS took to giving very extended security issue support to old versions of Windows it you’re a large-scale commercial license customer.