Sturdy Pete said:
correct me if i'm wrong (know very little about this) but i though the reason mac's wer're preferred for audio work was the better performace per clock speed of the G3/G4 etc processor - rather than any particular features os the OS? (although i know thats supposed to be a bit more stable / less processor hungry..)
Nope,
The reason Macs were and are used in studios primarily was because they were the original platform for Pro-Tools - no more, no less. The amount of FUD that Steve Jobs threw out during those vaunted 'faster per clock' demonstrations* was something Mr. Gates himself would have been proud of. Neither machine is (or has been in the last 5 years or so) inherently superior for audio work. Apple's purchase of eMagic was an attempt to force computer musicians back onto their platform after the PC platform overtook theirs in terms of raw horsepower.
I'd agree that Darwin (the underpinnings of what OSX is built on) is less inherently insecure than NTFS5 (the underpinnings of XP), but both of the OSes have so much cruft added thanks to their respective graphical interfaces that the relative advantages of the underpinnings are cancelled out.
In short, these days you pays your money and you takes your choice.
J.
(* - Jobs used specially-compiled versions of Photoshop with all optimisations for the PPC G3 and later G4 turned on on the Mac version, and all Pentium/MMX/SSE optimisations turned off for the Wintel version)
