The Pyramix distributor for the US east coast claimed (over the phone of course) that because DAW apps are coded on PC then ported over to a mac that they run better on PCs (since that’s how they were designed to run).
Apart from the claim that DAWs on a PC also sound better, is there credible merit to this claim from a computer engineering and software design standpoint?
I’d be willing to bet that he’s never made software in his life.
While that may possibly be true for some DAWs, the opposite is also true for others. Sonar was PC only for a long time, so their mac version probably doesn’t have as much real world testing done to it.
FL is also coming out with a mac version, and I suspect it will be a bit behind the PC in terms of stability for a bit.
Protools sucks equally on both platforms.
But to say that as a blanket statement is ignorant at best.
You should really stop getting information from sales reps. 90% of the time, they haven’t a clue what they are talking about, and the other 10% of the time they are actively lying.
haha
Just wondered.
Leave it to a musician or ‘studio engineer’ to make claims about the software code…right? lol
The more I’ve come to understand avid as a company the more I understand why they’ve neglected certain products. The bigger a company gets, the more prone it is to ignore functional flaws in minor areas. In order to focus on what it feels the larger scale growth is.
Classic example. Mark Cuban buys a web based clothing retailer. They beg and plead with him to move the site to a new platform. He bandaids the old one and tells them to keep using it, even though it appears to be as half-functional as our old RR site. But ‘it works!’
So could be better != to worth the time to fix. The bigger the company, the less concerned everyone gets with making all the important (but smaller) details perfect 
big companies have too much inertia to be able to be able to listen to customers. If you are the manager of the PT team, you have to justify everything you do to your higher ups, and if they don’t see the financial incentive to do something, you can’t do it, unless you really want to make waves in the company.
The higher ups at Avid can see that people will buy pro tools, whether it works or not, so why would they spend resources making it better? The problem is that if you go down that road long enough, it eventually catches up to you. But the good news for everybody involved is that they can all point the finger at someone else. Avid can say the PT team didn’t make a product that people would buy, and the PT team can say that Avid didn’t give them the resources to make it happen.
As an ex salesman who worked pretty hard at being informed, that’s a touch harsh. There are bad salesmen, just like there are engineers who can’t hear anything unless they see it on paper. I’ll try not to cry.
The thing that convinced me to switch over to mac was the time I took a fairly standard macbook at the time and installed Windows 7 on it and ran it up against my (significantly better specs) Dell PC. The meager Macbook absolutely smoked that Dell. That was just with the OS.
At this point, I’d use either and don’t really stress over performance as much as I did back then. I feel like those days that we saw huge increases in performance with each new chipset have slowed down. Moving from a 486 to a Pentium back in the day was a big, big deal. Moving from one i5 to the latest is marginal by comparison.
So for me, it comes down to reliability over time and my experience has shown me that macs seem to win for me in that category.
Not that any of this remotely tackles your question. haha!
I guess my point was that at this point in the game, I truly don’t think that this guy has as much merit as he would’ve 10-15 years ago, when the 2 platforms had far less in common. My 2 cents.
I’m sure you were one of the good guys. A rare breed, but I guess they do exist.
haha…
funny to think about how banking, medicine, and law all require licenses, but music and sales don’t even require a brain.
Being in IT, and having years of using both platforms, I can say it really depends on the software and the company producing it. I’ve used software on one platform that runs amazingly well, and then switched platforms and use the same software yet feel like I’ve gone back a decade in terms of performance. If you take Adobe software, I can switch from Window to Mac and not even realise I’ve switched OS’s, for me it’s seamless. I do the same with MS Word, and wonder if it was made by the same company.