Why Mac??? Options

[bagadat]

hi guys... i was wondering if you could help me out here....

i work for the support department of a religious association and the association is looking to upgrade their daw to improve the quality of their products and productivity....

in our media department, my collegue records the live preacing into his pc and processes the audio... to finally burn the end product for backup...

my boss has asked me to do some research on daws and what actually goes on inside of it.... so that we might take a technical approach to either upgrading our present daw or getting something completely new...

being a pc user, i've found a lot of info about how to tweak my pc for optimum performance and what actually goes on inside of it.... the same goes for linux (although i'm not a linus user)...

but now, my boss wants to look at mac as an option too.... but i know absolutely nothing about it.... i've heard that this is what the pros use for daws... but i would like to know why???

n other words, why is mac so powerful, are the softwares that it offers good and user friendly.... what are the recommendations for a mac daw for simple speech editing and mutlitrack analogue recording in terms of HW and SW and why...

do you guys think you could help me out or at least direct me to a place where my quezies could be answered...

thanx a lot......

[tsuliman]

A bit of history for those interested in why the Mac is the leader for computer music enthusiasts:

1. Creative types have always favored the Mac because of its simplicity and elegance.
2. Apple's strict control of hardware compliance ensured that things would work properly, unlike the Wintel platform that was a nightmare for hardware and drivers. It's a little better now, but Mac is still superior.
3. Built-in FireWire. Many Wintel machines still lack this. I hate to be a snob, but USB is not acceptable for audio or video applications.
4. OS X is the most stable OS. Audio users want to work on audio rather than spend hours tweaking the OS or firmware, restarting, overclocking, reinstalling, fighting spyware, etc.

Ironically, several years ago, many in the audio field begged Apple to create standards for audio files, MIDI, cablling, etc. Apple refused, saying that we were too small a market segment, and we ended up with OMS! That is the only reason there is ANY music done on PCs. If Apple had created CoreAudio, AudioUnits, CoreMIDI at that time, they would _completely_ dominate the market.

I have known countless people over the years who have said the same thing, "I chose the PC over the Mac to save a few bucks, but I haven't been able to get my music software/hardware to work."