There were legitimate reasons to pay the Apple Tax at the time. One of the primary ones is that USB is an asynchronous protocol while Firewire was a synchronous protocol, so that a USB audio interface necessarily had more latency than a Firewire one (to give time to buffer the packets arriving out of order). That was solved with USB2, though. Color control was at system level within Apple (or was easier to get to, anyway) while Microsoft was always tricky to manage. If you purchased your peripherals within the Apple ecosystem you had a higher chance of things going together, whereas if you braved the wilds of Windows you were likely to lose days or weeks getting all your components working well together.

Nowadays Windows is likely to throw up four or five nag windows about whatever you have plugged in, and it may push an update that borks you hard, but the big outfits have a M$ backend anyway because all the IT guys have long since thrown up their hands at Apple. Yeah, you can print with Apple and yeah, you can log onto the web with Apple but most of the big plants are either Unix or M$ in racks.

Apple still has an absolutely insane market cap. They're also like 1/3rd of all smartphones in the United States. I forget what mind-boggling amount of revenue they make on the fuckin' App Store every month but it's not like they're "stumbling." It's that the creative professionals that kept their market share during the dark times have not only been left out in the cold, they've been kicked in the nuts and pissed on in passing.

I've still got four Apple computers in my tender care. I'm typing on one right now. But seriously. Fuck apple.