Adobe is probably popping open a champagne for every cross-platform Creative Cloud competitor that gets mothballed with Apple's capital. If Microsoft acquired Affinity next, the Adobe offices would look like a disco ball for a week.
"graphics people" aren't the core people using Adobe's products though. As evidenced by the terrible designs people keep cranking out using photoshop. And by the huge market for terrible-design-by-numbers Canva.com
I guess it depends where you work. In CAD and 3D animation work, Windows machines outnumber the Macs I see 10:1. In smaller shops this ratio probably flips around but Adobe (and others) have a large and captive contingent of Windows users to profit off.
We all live in our own bubbles. I never saw a tech person using MacOS, it's always Windows or Linux - I assume that's not your experience either (and I only know a few people using MacOS privately). That probably mostly depends on the country one resides in.
Well, the view laid out here also corresponds to actual statistical reality: About 29% of developers reported using Macs (of any kind) as of a few years ago, it's not even close to "most", as some HN visitors would have you believe. The bubble is very real.
Statistically speaking there was no "most developers use this", but the closest OS offering was Windows at 45%.
Given Apple's poor performance on the OS side the past few years I'm not sure the hardware has managed to keep users on their side anyway; they even lost DHH very publicly not that long ago... So the numbers might be even worse now.
Edit:
In the latest StackOverflow survey 31.8% of developers report using MacOS (for personal and professional use), 57.9%/47.6% for Windows (personal/professional use). So both MacOS and Windows are eating into Linux's share at the moment, with Windows offering them to instead run Linux inside of Windows.
I've been forced to use Windows in the creative graphics world. Back long ago in the dark ages, I did layout/graphics for a 'zine that was all done on Windows NT with Adobe software delivered to press on a Syquest disk.
More recently (2017ish), I was on Windows 7 for another stint at graphics.
Maybe I've just had the misfortune that others have been able to avoid??
Really? I worked in Hollywood for many years and all the color grading and photo editing was done on PCs with Sony professional color grading monitors, which weren't supported right on Macs.
Pixelmator could never compete with Adobe. Their expertise is on Mac and until now they didn't have the resources to make a big product like Photoshop or Illustrator (at some point they shared the idea of making a vector graphics product but it was abandoned).
Another point is macOS has a significant market share in the creative industries. Personally I know zero designers/illustrators using Windows. My hunch is Mac users represent probably 50% or more of Adobe users.
Adobe is probably popping open a champagne for every cross-platform Creative Cloud competitor that gets mothballed with Apple's capital. If Microsoft acquired Affinity next, the Adobe offices would look like a disco ball for a week.