That's true of course, but I guess my point is it's better if you have it. I realized this since I know a lot of illustrators, and when I first started seeing them at work I saw a lot of them have the same setup: Macbooks, EIZO monitors, Wacoms etc. At first I thought it was a cult and group think, but eventually I realized they save a lot of time on figuring out what to get. There are probably better things than what they have, but what they have works good enough and that's fine.
There's a risk to this as well, though - marketing becoming more important than quality, and difficulty for new products to make it into the market means stifling of innovation, which can lead to semi-monopolies. In the case of Eizo and Wacom it's probably fine, but Apple are a bit more dubious.
The other risk here is that you'll have '100 million' dollar company that makes a good product, and it gets bought up by one of those multi billion dollar groups designed to suck every bit of profit out of companies like it. The product and support will quickly turn to trash, but peoples momentum will allow the new parent to profit handsomely off the transaction.
Simply put, every single product a company puts out needs subjected to review, and those same products need checked on to ensure the manufacture isn't starting to skimp and change the exact same model number as time goes on.
> In the case of Eizo and Wacom it's probably fine
I can quickly name up their primary competitors in this space, and for some reason (note: definitely anecdotal) I do see that for them, for the last ~5 years they are now being fiercely competed from both budget and professional angles.
> but Apple are a bit more dubious.
Me too. While Apple is definitely stumbling right now, unlike the previous two there is no serious competition for Apple. While Windows might be fine on a desktop that was built for-spec by specialty builders (and Linux render farms!), laptops are definitely still subpar even for the best attempts (like Acer's D series and Microsoft's Surface laptops). For iPad, I can say that Microsoft and Samsung are only the somewhat competent here, especially that stock Android is still atrocious when it comes to tablet factors, and ChromeOS still generally uses Android apps.
Just buy a Dell (for the money) or Thinkpad (for longevity) laptop. I haven't had a problem installing a Debian-derived distro on either brand since 2007 or so. Wifi, external monitors, printing, sleep, everything just works.
I have heard people have trouble with bluetooth and with fingerprint readers, but I don't use them so I cannot comment.
... I hope that you have read the thread and knew that this is for those in arts and media production, right? While large companies (like Disney) do have Linux render farms, and I am satisfied with Krita and Blender, most people do use Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere and cannot switch due to network effects?
