I would concur. You can record high quality encoded audio on your iPhone, audio design on your iPad with your other samples, and add the mixed soundscape into your film on iMac.
I literally know someone in the media industry who’s whole effortless workflow is what makes him a go-to guy for quick and flexible turnaround for audio mastery for films. He works exclusively on apple devices for this exact reason.
I’m not saying it’s impossible another way, but he really likes the ecosystem.
At this point I’d call it more of a legacy approach - they definitely still control the space, but the workflow is quite easily accomplished on other systems.
I’d also add many (SO MANY) of the pro audio and video systems out there are also running Linux, so even with sa mac-focused workflow, many of the pros out there are using Linux (often without any clue that they are).
So to me its similar to Windows on the desktop - its not necessarily the best option in all cases, but its often the path of least resistance. As a result, pretty much all of them buy into an Apple ecosystem from the get-go.
15 years ago you would get laughed out of art school if you didn’t have a Mac. At least that’s the gist I get from my artistic friends.
Probably still the same today.
Doesn’t change the reality of production though when it comes to audio and video though. Final Cut started getting… Problematic in flow some years back, Adobe started to make moves before they, you know, did what Adobe does, and BlackMagic bought DaVinci about 15 years ago actually.
At this point, the only places I know of that are using final cut or premiere in their workflow do so for legacy reasons. Many have shifted to resolve, which works quite beautifully on Linux. In the smaller shop realm for audio, reaper is king (which also works beautifully on Linux).
The “need” for a Mac there is pure fabrication.
For modeling, pros are probably using Houdini, though I’d say blender just behind that. Both of which - again, Linux.
About the only thing I can think of where pros are consistently using something not Linux friendly in the creative world is photo editing (Photoshop of course).
Now I will say that pretty much anything a pro shop will use will work on a Mac, and that is to me the main reason they are still at the top. Plus the weird Apple fanboy/elitism that developed around it.
I was in art school around then and a good portion of us were pirating windows 98 or windows NT. And we were running pirated Photoshop and pirated Illustrator on it…a lot of us pirated everything.
