That's good on you, and this isn't sarcasm, I do mean it, you must be one hell of a talent.
Wait... look again: $750 for mixing, $750 for the editing. Some of this material was quite complex, and the instrumentation wasn't only different from song to song, but some songs were also consisting of material from several studios. $100/hour isn't considered expensive for a studio here - some studios (including one of the studios that was used for recording this album) take more than twice as much. Based on this rate, you could say that I charge $100 per hour for a mix that takes 7.5 hours.
Anyway, I know of several ex-Pro Tools users that have gone native, and when it comes to mixing, you can use any buffer you like. You can mix an entire album using the 1024 buffer, meaning that on the 2.4 gHz Core2Duo MacBook Pro, I had more than enough power to do the job I needed to do. On my current Mac Pro I can work with 150 24-bit stereo tracks (playing all the time) with 6-700 plugins in the song and it won't use more than 60-70% of my available power - and if I open a normal song (like eg. the songs from the project I mixed) the CPU meter will show CPU activity in the 10-20% range, so looking at the bare facts, I don't need a Mac Pro or a Pro Tools HD system to do this kind of work. My client knew this - he has a TDM system but does all his work on his MacBook Pro himself, and he was rather thrilled than worried by the fact than one can mix an album on a MacBook Pro. The record label was very happy with the mix, and didn't even ask what kind of hardware I was using.
I'm yet to meet one top engineer that gets away with doing a final mix on a laptop (I guess partly because no studio with proper acoustic environment and outboard gear uses a laptop as it's primary computer)
I do have a 'proper' studio, with several large rooms, good preamps and monitors, two racks of outboard hardware that I hardly use, and a lot of time and money has been put into proper acoustic treatment of the control room.
I currently have four Macs, and the record label guys really don't give a rats ass about which of them I use or if the work I do need extra DSP hardware, or if I rely on native DSP power or separate DSP cards. I'm not in any way against using external hardware, but most people nowadays seem to understand that whether I would have used an external digital reverb or an internal plugin, I use 'software + hardware' anyway.
The computers isn't in the control room, and if I wanted to, I could have pretended I was doing this mix on a large, bulky computer - but why would I do that? Both my client and I know that one can get more DSP power natively than we could in our Pro Tools TDM systems, so - since a plugin running on a TDM chip doesn't sound better than a plugin running on a 'native' DSP chip anyway - why not enjoy the development instead of pretending that we need something we don't?
There is so much optimization happening under the hood from Apple these days - a lot if improvements regarding DSP use and stability can be seen between 10.5.2 and 10.5.4, and between Logic 8 and Logic 8.02, which means that it's possible to get an enormous amount of DSP power out of these setups.
I remember similar comments when I first started to use PT hardware around Pro Tools 1.0... 'What do you think people will say when they realize that you don't have a tape recorder?' When I later sold starter to connect my outboard to the Pro Tools hardware instead and mixed 'in the box', and later sold my mixer - the same thing. Today (or: 2-3 years ago), a similar process (and a similar set of comments) is happening because native systems have become so powerful - and this won't stop - but the comments will, just like they did about not using tape and not using mixers.
But it's nice to hear that you've made a success of yourself by going a different route to what's been considered the 'standard' way for decades.
Several people I know that are considered having 'one hell of a talent' - to use your term - have been following the same route for a while. I know people who own several Pro Tools HD systems who do all they work in Logic natively - either on a laptop (when a laptop is enough) or on a Mac Pro. I'd like to see myself as revolutionary, a pioneer or 'a hell of a talent' - but to do what I did (in terms of DSP power) you just need to have enough of it - which my laptop had for that project.
A computer, a digital effect and a DSP card are basically just calculator. It doesn't matter how big it is or what you paid for it, what matters is what you can do with it in real time. The real time requirements for mixing aren't as challenging as real time requirements for recording. What a calculator basically does is to receive some ones and zeros, rearrange them, replaces some ones with zeroes and zeros with ones, and send then to some output. The difference between a digital reverb/DAW/software based synth and a $20 Casio calculator is mainly the amount of real time processing power and the algorithms (plus choice of outputs). Number crunching is number crunching whatever way you look at it, and regarding that job I mentioned, it should have actually have been costing a little more, knowing how much work it is.
In a very few years know from now I could probably do that kind of work on an iPhone. The day I can connect an external monitor and a wireless keyboard to an iPhone, I'll buy one. The day an iPhone can run a full blown version of OS X, you can use it to make mixes sounding just as good as if they would have been mixed on a high end digital mixer or Pro Tools HD7, or the most powerful Mac Pro. It's all a combination of ears and number crunching (and some experience), and while I see no particular reason to insist on mixing on an iPhone or a laptop, I see no reason
not to use a laptop when it offers everything I need for that job - as long as I can have a large monitor attached to it.
It's just a way of squeezing as much money out of the clients as they can.
Some clients only call back the contacts that they feel are not trying to squeeze as much money out of them as they can... and if they do, who will keep making money in the future?
And that they're also simply used to working with the system, so they save a bit of time (ie money for themselves) by going that route.
If it's correct that Apple took 49% of the US pro editing market with Avid "trailing on just 22%" in 2007, there will soon be more people that are used to work with FCP than with Avid. Since almost every pro studio I'm aware of have both Pro Tools and some native DAW installed, we could see 'native' taking over the pro audio market as well within a few years. Most people probably want to buy better converters, preamps and microphones than keep spending money on updating their PCI cards anyway.
Rules!