They were the only game in town.

You also have to keep in mind that the whole world came out with "USB audio interfaces" when USB itself is an asynchronous protocol. So it wouldn't reliably do 96k, it wouldn't lock up to word clock, and you'd get all sorts of nasty smear. Of course if you were listening on bullshit monitors or bullshit headphones and compressing the ever loving bejeesus out of things, you maybe didn't notice and if you were running pirated Radium warez that you got from a buddy at the club on a burned CD it really didn't matter.

But as soon as things got real things got synchronous. The reason Apple held onto Firewire until the absolute bloody end is it's synchronous. As a part of the protocol it ships 8 pairs of digital audio. Period. You can spit audio down a firewire cable without even needing to translate.

Just as important: if shit's broken, and I've got a Pro Tools sound card and Pro Tools software on a Mac, Pro Tools has to qualify that mac. If i call up Digidesign/Avid and say "shit's broke" they can say "okay what's the error" and they'll get something. They've got a handful of macs, they've got a handful of hardware devices, they're done.

You call up on the Windows side and it becomes "what motherboard" "what CPU" "what GPU" "what memory" "what audio device" "what other audio device" "what other strange peripherals" "what else is on the USB bus" because windows gives no fucks it just sprays its data all over creation. This is why Avid officially supports eight Windows computers, all of them HP workstations. Pro Tools not working on Windows? Not running an HP workstation? Tough shit.

Right now? Right now Pro Tools won't work if you have a Realtek chip on your motherboard. Why? Because Realtek rewrote their drivers to remove a bunch of functionality and Windows auto-propagates all your drivers and that functionality was necessary for Pro Tools to say "don't even think about considering this bullshit chip an audio device". That's an official bug report. It took me four hours to work around and I'm in the damn credits of the software. Traditionally this wasn't a problem on the Mac side but I'm also dealing with the fact that two of my Native Instruments synths are borked because Apple decided to update Logic without telling anyone ahead of time, which crashes about five programs that belong to Native Instruments, so their fix makes things work again on the Mac side while completely breaking the Windows side.

SO long story short, yeah tradition because everyone sucks now.