FCP was never the only solution in the pro video editing market. Avid has been the traditional choice since the mid-'90s, but FCP was encroaching.
Unfortunately the botched introduction of FCP X sent Apple back a decade in this market. FCP X was too different from 7, and it didn't even support many of the workflows that pros needed. Since users had to learn new software anyway, a lot of editors went to Avid or Adobe (Premiere is quite good nowadays).
Correct. At least a decade. Combined with the 'all-our-apps-for-50-bucks from Adobe has made a lot of studio's jump ship to Adobe Premiere. I mean what was Apple smoking? FCP wasn't even compatible with FCP.
I'm not saying FCP X is bad today, but the 1.0 release was an undisputed flop.
A lot of people jumped ship to Avid and Adobe rather than wait for FCP X to eventually improve. Convincing them to take another look at FCP X won't be easy.
While it's nice to have a great machine for editing photos, or writing software, it's more a "nice to have". As long as you don't run out of RAM, most of the time you aren't limited by CPU speed. And a lot of those tasks tend to be harder to parallelise, so having 12+ cores isn't a huge deal. Video editing is much more likely to be limited by CPU, and it parallelises nicely, so a better machine saves tonnes of time.
Have a look at the current options Apple is putting out. If you need something that's cheaper than what Apple puts out, or something that's bleeding edge, then you're out of luck. This is especially true with video cards.
Apple used to offer the best value workstations on the market. They got lazy, or maybe the Chinese / Taiwanese started undercutting IBM, Dell, and HP; which forced prices down to a point where Apple wasn't interested.
And Apple doesn't have a very predictable upgrade cycle. If you're spending $5,000 on a machine, only to see the next version come out a few months later, it's not going to be very fun. Nor is holding off upgrades, because you just don't know if a new model is around the corner.
Video requires a heap of grunt. Apple wasn't offering machines with enough grunt, or cheap enough machines. They looked at the cost of switching, vs the cost of sticking with Apple, and a lot decided to switch.
Is this actually the case? I don't know anything about that segment of the computing industry, but I just assumed that FCP was the industry standard.