I'm running a Logic set up on my 2012 MBP, and I've never felt limited by its capabilities. I've been running Macs for music production for almost 20 years, and in my experience they have all at some point not had quite enough in the bag to let me do what I wanted of them. This is the first one (now fours years old) that has stayed ahead of my needs. I can run multiple copies of Massive, and rows of Waves plugins no problem.
I have hit limits with real-time 3D stuff, like gaming and Houdini, but music production is still well within its capabilities for me.
The people who make film/game soundtracks need a LOT of ram, and fast disks, because they're using terabytes of samples in each project. Also massive has pretty low requirements.
The main gripe musicians have with apple is the new OSX breaking their setup every year. The sandboxing in el capitan was particularly disastrous.
It sounds like you're basing this argument on hearsay and not personal experience (shocker.) I have various audio setups with different macs and interfaces and no OS update has broken anything with my setups since 10.6 era.
I don't think that's fair. Even major audio companies were warning customers not to upgrade to Sierra for months due to compatibility issues. Here's iZotope's page about compatibility with their audio plugins - if you bought it more than a couple of years ago, it won't work on Sierra:
Personally I had to spend a few hundred dollars upgrading my audio software that worked in Mountain Lion so it would run on El Capitan. I'm still running into a few glitches in places.
That page indicates what versions of those plugins are certified by the vendor to run on Sierra. That doesn't mean that older versions won't run, it just means they haven't been certified to do so.
I've been running software on Sierra that is only certified by the developer for Snow Leopard through Yosemite, and it still runs just fine for my needs. Apple puts a lot of effort into binary compatibility.
My personal experience disagrees with you. Waves, Native Instruments, and others, have had various issues over the years with OS X upgrades. I have projects spanning several years that forced me to wait a revision or two before upgrading to ensure they would continue to load and mix down as intended.
That's fair. I definitely have done a lot of sample-based and multi-track audio work and again have never hit that limit (on this MBP). However I do agree that if you rely on 3rd-party plugins there is a crapshoot every year as to how long you have to wait before compatibility reaches 100% and you can upgrade your system without breaking previous mixes or set ups.
I'm running a Logic set up on my 2012 MBP, and I've never felt limited by its capabilities. I've been running Macs for music production for almost 20 years, and in my experience they have all at some point not had quite enough in the bag to let me do what I wanted of them. This is the first one (now fours years old) that has stayed ahead of my needs. I can run multiple copies of Massive, and rows of Waves plugins no problem.
I have hit limits with real-time 3D stuff, like gaming and Houdini, but music production is still well within its capabilities for me.