According to Statcounter in the market share of desktop operating systems Windows claims 72.98% and OS X 15.56% (June 2021). I wonder if these proportions are approximately equivalent to Dorico sales? I noticed that most tutorials are shown on OS X computers. Is this just a preference of the staff trainers or are Dorico users generally more on the apple side than the average?
Asking this question one day after the release of Dorico for iPad may not be entirely coincidental. I’m aware that the tablet market has its own conditions. But its just another hint that gives me the feeling that Dorico tends to say: Buy Apple.
Without wishing to open that old Win v. Mac debate, having cut my teeth on a Commodore C64, graduated to an Atari 1040ST, earned my PhD on a self-built (and constantly upgraded) PC, I cannot imagine for one moment having to go back to a PC, I switched to Mac in 2010. It really does “feel” smoother.
As to the iPad and not Android question, I’m pretty sure it’s been addressed here with regard to the un-viability of the huge range of physical differences in Android machines. If something works on one iPad, it’ll work on all - and that cannot be said for Android (and often for PCs too).
This is quite a complex question and one that is bound to generate a lot of strong feelings, so first of all may I please make an appeal to keep the playground stuff about which platform is clearly superior to the other out of this thread.
As it happens, the majority of Dorico users are running macOS, but it’s not an overwhelming majority (the last time we checked it in detail, it was around 60% on macOS and 40% on Windows). I don’t know how this breaks down by geography, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the proportion using macOS was higher than this in countries like the US, and lower in countries like Germany.
Many of us in the Dorico team do happen to prefer Macs, but by no means all of us: there are strong preferences for operating systems, hardware, etc. within the team just like out there in the wider world of computer users.
We do not especially prioritise macOS over Windows, and we consider them of absolutely equal importance. Now that we support iPadOS as well, that does mean that we are supporting two Apple-made operating systems, but that doesn’t mean that we will be less interested in supporting Windows as a consequence. In fact it is my hope that the new multi-touch components we’ve built for Dorico for iPad will also work really nicely with touch-enabled Windows computers like the Surface and so-called “convertible” laptops.
Well, I use a monster PC festooned with SSDs etc and a Macbook Pro - both are great. I keep sample libraries on a portable 2TB SSD which I plug in to the Mac or PC as needed. Dorico and Cubase work perfectly on both, with projects kept on iCloud, so they’re always in sync. The icing on the cake is the incredible Dorico iPad app - makes the whole system super productive. If there was a Scoring Olympics, Steinberg would take Gold!
I’m not surprised to hear that demographics lean towards mac; the old trope is that MacOS tends to be favored by people in the arts. I do think this is generally true; I certainly observed it in college. That’s not to say that people in the arts don’t also run windows; I just think there is a long-persistent idea that macs are better for artsy schtuff. (Whether you agree or not is irrelevant; the perception is out there and gets repeated.) Some of the other creation tools like Logic and FCPX also have huge numbers of devotees, so some people are roped into macos just for the sake of a single program. I purchase macs, but I grew up on windows and used it for years at work, so I consider myself relatively platform agnostic; I’m comfortable on both (as an aside, I really don’t understand why people act like they are night and day different… they’re much more similar than they are different…). But, as I said, I’m not surprised. I also don’t think that such a trend is necessarily an endorsement of one platform over the other; it may simply be a reflection of broader art-world-related trends. I suspect that windows shares will slowly start to wane as well, since Apple has been so agressive in targeting the youth market as well as the collegiate education market. Some colleges (and even secondary schools now) assign ipads as mandatory equipment for school; I wouldn’t be surprised if this trend continues long into the future and continues to affect this dynamic.
Of course, having an ipad isn’t necessarily an indicator that they use macos at home (although it’s not unlikely). But there’s no doubt that ipads dominate the tablet market (by a country mile) in first-world markets.
I saw them open up the Cash machine at the bank: there’s an actual Compaq PC box inside, and yes, it boots up into Windows.
There are Windows desktop boxes embedded into all kinds of systems: they are in factories and warehouses and power stations and printing presses, etc, etc.
Mac is almost exclusively ‘consumer’ - and the only offices you’ll see with rows and rows of Macs are publishing firms, graphic design studios, and advertising agencies. (And Pixar.)
You need to be careful about the inferences you draw from ‘raw’ sales numbers.
On the off chance you’re replying to my comment, I’m in no way implying that macs are more ubiquitous than windows machines; just like android, I know it’s far from it and it’s not even close. Windows are indeed the defacto for most things; I was just commenting on how macs pertain to people in the arts, not the wider global trend of usage.
In the 1990’ies I had at home an Atari Falcon, I bought to the music-conservatory 2 Mac’s (I had to maintain) with Logic for the arrangement-lessons, and I got an office with PC. And I was new to computers.
I know a man in a world wide corporation. He has of course a computer on his desk. Messages to him are only accepted in the form of a yellow post-it pasted on his computerscreen. But he is really creative in his job.
I left physics because I decided I didn’t want to spend my life hunting Higgs (not kidding). Actually all the real work in physics is on VAX VMS, I was getting a PhD when NT was introduced but there was little interest from the physics world at the time. Not sure what they’re using it for now other than control room maybe.
Not sure of the thrust of the question, you find Mac’s and PC’s among music people. What’s more interesting perhaps is how the Dorico experience differs on the two. I spent a year or two with it on Mac and switched to PC FWIW. Main thing is missing the magic trackpad which is pretty nice for panning and zooming. But you have keyboard equivalents on PC. For hardware is hands down PC, I was on a top spec Mac Pro and a top spec PC spanks it for a fraction of the cost. Otherwise the app looks nicer with Mac on the outside, but the music presentation is otherwise basically identical which is what counts. Oh also the built in support for MIDI and audio is better on Mac, that would be nice to have on PC.
I left the Apple platform FWIW due to the cost of hardware, and I was unable to get Dorico to run reliably on the machine.
Bear in mind that relatively large number of that ~73% windows share are standard office desk installations (in non creative industries), machines that will never get any custom software installed. It would be more interesting/relevant to see the market share in private/home computing, if stat counter would provide such measures.
This is why I’m on PC. Both of my kids and my wife have MacBooks, we all have iPhones, and I have an old Mac Mini set up for anyone to use for random browsing, grandparents when they visit, etc., but I’m on PC because my new build (Ryzen 5950x, RTX 3080) would cost a gazillion dollars on Mac.
This is annoyingly true. I have to use Voicemeeter and Bome MIDI Translator just to have everything working the way I want.
There is indeed a remarkable difference between 73% market share of windows computers to only 40% Dorico Windows sales, as stated by Daniel. Obviously there are significantly more Macs in private/home computing than in business environments.
3D art is predominantly (almost entirely) Windows, and art headcount outnumbers audio at pretty much all studios. Simple really, we need Nvidia hardware which Apple refuses to do, not to mention all the custom API’s Apple forces. Do Apple GPU’s even have ray tracing? Regardless there’s no comparison. Apple is a consumer company now, but audio requirements are such that that market can still be served (somewhat), but they would have happily pitched pro audio. For that matter, after switching from Logic to Nuendo, Logic looks like a consumer app in comparison now (apologies if you like and work with Logic)
I’m really not sure how 3D art is relevant for the majority of cases. My point is still that the majority of Windows installations are bog standard office machines in the non-creative industries, with Office and Outlook. That surely distorts the stats, and makes it less relevant for apps like Dorico.
