Apple gained so much professional mindshare in the early 2000s with FCP, Shake, Logic, Aperture, Motion, XSan, XServe, etc. I worked in a graphics/media studio at the time, and the excitement was palpable. And creating things with those apps was just fun.

It feels like a shame that only vestiges of that time remain today. The bar is much higher in some ways (lower in others), it takes a lot more skill and specialized knowledge to compete, and almost all vendors don't put in the same careful attention to detail (especially UX) that the Apple pro apps of that era had.