One project I worked on was where we needed to use proprietary software that only worked on OSX that would take a video, perform waveform analysis on the audio, and the output would be a properly timed closed captioned master with the text having been provided separately.
This was of course a small project, and only had a few Mac Minis rack mounted for the task, but I can easily see situations similar where you're tied to the platform for one reason or another.
Another is that Macs have their own raw image convertors, and if you're trying to sync photos to the cloud with raw files, and you want to match images with mac users, you're going to need OS X in the cloud.
If you don't have OS X in the cloud, then you're going to have to write your own raw image converter, and that means you can't sync with the OS X client native raw converter, complicating the workflow...
You're violating OSX license terms if you attempt to run OSX "in the cloud". That was the first idea I wanted to explore when the project was brought up, but for various legal reasons, we just bought the hardware. (Sidenote: Nothing is more frustrating than sitting in a technical meeting where an attorney has joined in, and explains you can't do something legally even though its the perfect technical solution).
You actually can (legally) run OS X "in the cloud", but it has to be on Apple hardware... which kind of defeats the purpose in this case :) But it can be quite useful for development / testing purposes.
"(iii) to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple
Software within virtual operating system environments on each Mac Computer you own
or control that is already running the Apple Software, for purposes of: (a) software
development; (b) testing during software development; (c) using OS X Server; or (d)
personal, non-commercial use."
A process would drop a video file and a text file in a directory, and then a script would execute the MacCaption binary for each file with a list of parameters to get the result we wanted. A captioned video file, as well as a WebVTT caption file, would be the results of the process. Those were then put into another workflow for dissemination.
Straightforward, although MacCaption was a terrible product to work with. They're owned by Telestream now (www.telestream.net/captioning/compare.htm).
One project I worked on was where we needed to use proprietary software that only worked on OSX that would take a video, perform waveform analysis on the audio, and the output would be a properly timed closed captioned master with the text having been provided separately.
This was of course a small project, and only had a few Mac Minis rack mounted for the task, but I can easily see situations similar where you're tied to the platform for one reason or another.