My understanding of this has been that OSX has always had much lower audio latency than Windows or Linux.
Apple have put quite a bit of effort into making their audio sub-systems both performant and reliable. Something that isn’t true on Windows and Linux at the moment.
I also assume that part of if is driven by audio professionals using Macs elsewhere, and you don’t want to be using an unfamiliar system when running a live performance. That’s the one place where “just let me Google that” doesn’t fly.
> My understanding of this has been that OSX has always had much lower audio latency than Windows or Linux.
Your understanding is wrong, at least with respect to Linux (which technically has lower latency than macOS/OSX has ever had).
One can debate the ease of use (and to be fair, macOS will likely win), but from a technical perspective, if you want the absolute lowest latency, Linux is the system to use.
At least ... that was true for PCI audio devices. At ardour.org we've been playing around with an M1 mini, and the ease with which it gets to 16 sample buffer size with a stock USB audio device is astounding and envy-inducing.
Apple have put quite a bit of effort into making their audio sub-systems both performant and reliable. Something that isn’t true on Windows and Linux at the moment.
I also assume that part of if is driven by audio professionals using Macs elsewhere, and you don’t want to be using an unfamiliar system when running a live performance. That’s the one place where “just let me Google that” doesn’t fly.