[Prestidigitweeze]

It only took a few years on Mobile Read for me to understand the indifference demographic when it comes to professionals who use the Mac: It appears that many people here are programmers drawn to e-readers partly for their textual purity and ease of format manipulation. This is not a criticism; rather, it's a statement of site-wide priorities which don't begin and end with book lovers.

It's very likely that a programmer might ignore end users whose profession is dependent on macs (viewed as a dumbed-down locked-in system). They have to rely on macs not simply due to the diverse practicality of the tools themselves but because of compatibility with multiple formats and arrays of software between pro users and the people who pay them.

Since at last I'm beginning to understand this, I'll ask people who aren't interested in professionals in the arts to ignore the rest of this post.

The question is what's going to happen to professional use in the wake of the abandonment of professional needs. The easy answer would be to return to Windows, since the elements are all there (most specifically, Digidesign and Avid). But if that happens, there will still be a wake of bodies -- people who had to buy $40,000 systems to work with filmmakers, only to discover future development on their systems closed and their archives at least partly unreadable. Struggling small studios will go bankrupt and so will some professionals.

If Apple's pro-end market dies, the question is what will happen to all of that work. It looks as though Apple is not inclined to care or make concessions to past users at any level, as shown by the utter discontinuation of firewire on newer Mac laptops. People cannot even use Apple's migration assistant to move expensive authorized programs from one machine to another, let alone use legacy audio hardware without buying third-party interfaces like the Sonnet Echo (which might or might not do the job, as reports from professional users have shown). And never mind the recent move to make all future laptops impossible to customize.

That's a market which is small by comparison to Android's, one which only Microsoft seems to care about at present. Undiluted linux is powerful enough for music production but has not been its most problem-free environment so far and I doubt it will be. In terms of the future, I only wish that Windows were taking bites out of Apple.