Apple's Relationship with Pro Music Needs Mending
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Ten years ago there was simply no question in my mind that apple hardware + OS X was the right choice for audio/music production (not to mention a relatively hassle free Unix workstation for developers + some desktop software usage). Twenty years ago? Still Apple.
Over the last 3-4 years, however, I've come to the conclusion that my next purchase needs to be something else if for no other reason than to clearly understand the alternatives.
This is key:
> The bad news: Apple still can’t seem to keep third parties synced up with its now annual release cadence. In a now yearly ritual, Apple has broken plug-in validation for its own Audio Unit format. Open question: why? Why is this now a regular feature of updating an operating system for a format that has basically remained unchanged for years? Why shouldn’t desktop upgrades be the kind of no-brainer mobile upgrades are.
I have a hard time avoiding at least one of two conclusions:
(a) Apple either now lacks the necessary talent to do the quality of work they sustained with OS X for a while
(b) they fundamentally simply do not care at an institutional level
(And if it were really only about Audio Units, that'd be one thing. But it's not.)
I recently got rid of a late 2013 Retina MBP in favour of a late 2012 15" RMBP, and the difference in audio performance is astounding. No dropouts anymore, all my plugins work again, and Ableton is once again usable. I was hoping for a difference in performance but I was amazed at how much better the older one performed, with identical memory and SSD disk.
And that's not the only issue I had with the 13" Haswell RMBP. Often it would lose its entire USB chain (which includes the built-in trackpad and keyboard!) which would require me to remote into it to shut it down. Thunderbolt wasn't much better, with frequent network dropouts over a gigabit tb adapter. The poor thing barely worked out of the box and it didn't get much better.
I don't know what happened specifically with Haswell, but it seems like Apple and Intel haven't really been working to ensure it's a stable platform.
It's a mess.
The battery life is amazing when you can't do anything!
I used to have a very solid, extremely robust machine and OS, and that seems to be slowly being chipped at, progressively eroding confidence. Coupled with the fact that I'm unable to find truly worthy alternatives, the general tech devices landscape somehow looks subtly worse than even a couple of years ago. I'm not one to complain, but somehow, I'm getting concerned.
I dont thin Apple is run by either designer or engineer. Since Jobs death apple is run by marketing department and board wanting as much money as possible. There is noticable decline in quality of design and engineering.
Making waterproof iphone is reaction to market of waterproof android phones. Every designer understands the greatness of jack design. Its again move of marketing department to control headphone market and DRM your music.
It used to be that you had iphone. It was expensive, but it was one best phone Apple could build. Now how many iphone types you can buy? Thats marketing. It will fail because soon even general people will realize its not so good anymore.
I am sad abou OSX tho.
If any of it true, I came away with these thoughts:
1. Steve wanted a closed system.
2. He cared too much about form. He was not a coder. He was not a hacker. It was Woz. Steve was the business guy.
3. I think the world would be better off if Woz was offered, and took the CEO position after Jobs demise. We might have some really great, open source computers.
4. I don't think I will buy another new Apple product. I will buy used until someone takes their place, because there's so much used stock on Ebay, and CL.
5. But then again, their products are beloved by so many people. I have a relative who bought a new Imac. A $2970 Imac-- that's still in the box. it's been a two months. I asked why he hasn't set it up. He blamed it on me. "You haven't had the time lately, so i am still using my old barely working Imac."
6. That's some pretty spectacular Marketing--Product likability. It will be some time until the average user realizes Apple might be slipping. The average user knows noting about the benefits of an open source computer.
I write Mac software for a YC company in the pro video space. Our new product started deployments a couple of months back, and a major source of problems has been the Apple platform -- both hardware and software. It's so bad that we're actively working to move off the Mac completely. (I've spent 15 years doing Mac software, so this is a big deal for me.)
Apple doesn't have pro hardware anymore. The 2013 Mac Pro is a complete failure, maybe the worst computer they've ever made. We deployed a dozen Mac Pros, and four of them suffer from a GPU overheating problem that's widespread but little talked about -- Apple has been replacing Mac Pros quietly for years.
The original Mac Pro was a great computer for the pro market: lots of extensibility, high-quality cooling system. The new Mac Pro removed all that and offers no benefit to users like us. It's really more like a cylindrical rebirth of the infamous Power Mac G4 Cube.
The same heat problems apply to their laptops. Many MBP models with NVIDIA graphics end up needing yearly motherboard replacements, which Apple is providing through a special replacement program. (My previous MacBook Pro has had this done three times.) Apple's drive towards ever-thinner and ideally fanless computers like the 12" MacBook suggests that this trend isn't going to change. I'm afraid the next MacBook Pro will be the "worst of both worlds", a combination of traits from the 12" MacBook and the Mac Pro.
Meanwhile on the software front, macOS has become an unstable and unpredictable platform for high-performance media applications. The emphasis on power saving, sandboxing and relentlessly throttling down userspace applications has made it quite hard to ensure that all our processes keep ticking along as they should. Working around macOS features designed for fanless laptops is such a waste of time when our deployment environment would ideally be a rackmount old-style Mac Pro.
Looks like there's going to be lots of Windows 10 in my future :(
I use MacOS, these days, mostly for writing (occasional coding) and on the go editing on macbook. Nice example of what you've mentioned is Fade In Pro http://www.fadeinpro.com/ which filled vacuum left by impotent Final Draft (this is changing now with FD 10 slightly). It's just GREAT that you can use the same application in all three environments. In case of Fade In Pro you don't even have to buy separate licenses.
With Windows we can more or less hope customers can use a more mixed variation of hardware and get ok results. With Linux, it's unlikely we'd be able to let people go it alone.
I would love to leave Windows completely, but I need Ableton Live to work. Microsoft have completely lost what little goodwill I had towards them with Windows 10 and it's spying.
In the 90s as I was buying I actually was going to go with BeOS and had a Tascam DX2424 external hard drive recorder (Thing was awesome). Steinberg, as I was a week away from buying my first Apple computer, pulled the plug on BeOS applications. I went Windows NT Nuendo 1.0. 80% of the studios my size were all ProTools. I HATED ProTools and their hardware lock in.
After a while I kind of got a niche going and I would also work at mixing or engineering things at Apple based studios about once a month. I have always had the unfortunate luck of making every single Mac crash while I use them. I would speak about my frustration and the "Mac Guy" would shake his head and say I don't know as I would have to redo hours of work.
Later on in Video. I would be on Premier or Final Cut Pro and the same thing would happen where I was in the middle of hours long sessions and I would get some crash that wouldn't lose me work anymore but it got me out of "The Zone." If you ever did major video editing you know what that feels like. The Apple "crash" was different because sometime it would take a while to realize that while I have the video gui up what I was doing wasn't actually changing anything, or I couldn't grab a clip from a folder and import it OR the codex just isn't working so I can't see a preview and I would have to reboot.
I hate Apple software like Final Cut Pro because they use their own vocabulary. It was always not the standard vocabulary of the industry pre-digital nor what the other video/audio world was using.
Software Synths (Windows/Linux) seem to just work for me these days. My buddies swear with their Macs they can do the same things and then boom back to sampled sythns after a month or so due to "little issues" but they would never blame their machines or OS. I have noticed a ton more Windows in music performance the past year or two, but I really think that Linux could make a niche in live audio production a reality if the Native Instruments would provide a Linux port.
Non-Apple world is pretty ripe for Apple to lose massive market share like they are seeing the last 3 years in video.
How different the world would be today if that had happened.
Pentium II at 300 mhz has more videos playing then most computers could play today https://youtu.be/Qv6twfh2SgI?t=2m30s
The thing was you could unplug the computer by pulling the cord out and boot up and everything would immediately play where you stopped.
I can confirm anecdotally that this occurred with a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010). Despite claims that Apple hardware is reliable and holds its value, I'll never buy one of their personal computers again.
I have a 2008 Mac Pro that is still incredibly reliable, but I am starting to feel the need for a new computer for music production. And it doesn't look like they will even support the 2008 Pros with the next OS release.
I miss Snow Leopard -- Logic on Snow Leopard was an incredibly solid platform for music production!
I'm contemplating whether it might be possible to do all my music work on Mac Minis. I really like having four hard drives and a tower case...
Yearly? I know multiple people who need to get their 2011 MacBook Pro motherboard replaced on a monthly basis. One managed to make Apple give in and swap it for an equivalent 2015 model, and the others are still trying…
Instead they actively expended money making it fundamentally worse, and not just that but making it a zero-sum game. Many people correctly compared the Cylinder (it's hard to resist the more colloquial in our office "trashcan mac") MP to the old Cube in terms of basic thermal and design tradeoffs, but the Cube never inspire active dislike because there was still the MP. On the contrary the small niche of users that actually found its set of tradeoffs worth it had a soft spot for a long time. Nobody lost anything at all from the existence of the Cube, so the only people who got were those fine with it, and anyone else could just look from afar. By making the neoCube the only thing though Apple shot any hope of that.
And the Cylinder was form over function in a way I can't recall from Apple in a very long time, and also seemed a fundamental misreading of what they're good at and what they want to be actively engaged in. The mirror of an easily expandable pro friendly system offering flexibility on user side is that it also provides flexibility on the manufacturer side: because 3rd parties can do more entirely on their own, the manufacturer in turn can get away with doing less because the gaps can be filled in by the market. The more control a manufacturer takes for themselves, the more responsibility falls on their shoulders in turn, which is why command-and-control economics tends to have scalability problems vs approaches that make more use of markets.
At any rate it's a real bummer. I've looked at Xeon hackintosh efforts but that's definitely getting into pretty shaky territory and with Apple abandoning pro systems themselves support is probably only going to get worse. I agree it is time, probably past time, to start planning to abandon the platform but boy will it be painful (closer to 25 years in my case).
After using nothing but Apple products for a decade, I am being forced to wean myself off them, because I cannot depend on Apple for the tools of my trade. What they've done with their Pro hardware is ridiculous. Even if they release the greatest computers ever released for Pros in a month, their history over the past few years makes them completely unreliable.
Final Cut Pro, Aperture, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, Mac Pro, XServe, OSX Server, form, in one way or another at least a majority of their pro offerings, for any useful definition of the word Pro, and Apple's behavior with these products have ranged from dumbing down, to neglect, to straight up abandonment.
And it's not just pro users, but also "prosumers". iPhoto, Mail, Calendar, iWork all been dumbed down to the point of not being able to serve any prosumer needs.
Apple provides experience and value to consumers that seems far beyond their competitors but their actions towards pro users couldn't have been more clear in their intent. Lip service with an occasional teaser to keep you hooked.
Or they just don't care and the iPad Pro is really the computer of the future at Apple. The huge wait since the last update of whole range of Mac hardware really start to make me feel as they have just put it on life support. With maybe one last significant update maybe this year and then let the platform slowly drown, with infrequent updates.
IMO, if they announce a cloud version of XCode that publishes compiled app in a special developer app store, that would mean the end of the Mac line.
The entire consumer Eco system, including support, 3rd party integration, 3rd party apps, first party apps, and hardware, just seems significantly ahead of any competitor. I find it hard to see how a loss of the pro market will affect their ability to sell hundreds of billions of dollars of iOS devices every year.
Which, of course, worries me even more about the future of Apple in the professional space.
Apple is terrible with problems with their hardware. Look at the Iphone 6 Plus touch fiasco, and there's millions of other examples.
I'm trying to think of the name of that Apple hardware fixit guy with the youtube channel who did the awesome "fuck Apple" rant. Ask him how far ahead of the competitors Apple is.
EDIT: designed for heavy sustained CPU applications
For music production and live events for example, the reliability, stability, compatibility and application support is why many chose Apple. To think that professionals choose hardware based on specs alone means you don't really understand the reasoning.
Looking at music applications, for instance, my first impression was that the Core Audio and Core Midi APIs were a heck of a lot better for developers than the Windows equivalent (Win32 I believe for MIDI still, and ASIO for any serious audio). There's even a bigger contrast in mobile: Core Audio and Core MIDI on iOS seem to blow away Android's primitive very primitive audio APIs. (I have done actual development in neither so if anyone has feel free to chime in, this is just from skimming the specs online.)
Happier developers with more rock solid foundations leads to better applications that utilize audio / MIDI (such as music apps) and therefore a better vibe among actual musicians. Apple was always known among artists that I know as the computer that Just Worked and was stable. It's actually hard to think of a show (where the musician used a laptop) where it wasn't an Apple, to be honest.
Unfortunately, in the last couple of years, I've heard a fair amount of grumbling about Apple instability. I think they're in danger of losing their formally solid reputation.
Regarding OSX, IMHO I don't believe it is particularly well suited to audio work, and the same argument applies to Windows. AFAIK both have no true realtime capability, such that a minimum amount of CPU resource can be guaranteed for an audio stream so that it is glitch free. QNX Neutrino and RTLinux offer this, but their use has typically been embedded systems. A live gig is therefore always a gamble. Some background process, like software update or icloud, could spring into action and cause glitches at any time. This is made worse by power management that throttles down your CPU and sleeps your IO devices.
Well, I started getting fed up with Apple ~6 years ago now. After my hard drive crashed, I moved to to producing on exclusively on Linux as a personal, mental and spiritual challenge. This was very difficult in 2011. As much as I wanted Ardour to be what I wanted it to be, the only thing that was stable enough to get stuff done on was QTractor...
Since then, Linux has gotten waayyyy better for music production. KXStudio is excellent. (don't waste time on Ubuntu Studio, it's not configured well). There are plenty of amazing LV2 and LADSPA plugins, and even some good VST plugins like TAL NoizeMaker. Ardour is great if you're lucky to get a stable build. As far as "mainstream pro" music production on linux... it's maybe not quite there yet for a general audience, but if you're a producer/composer/independent artist with some technical patience, Linux audio production is completely amazing. It's a whole different paradigm with plenty of room for professionals. The fact that Jack is totally modular from the get-go is extremely powerful. It means that stuff can be combined in all kinds of ways. (check this thing out if you haven't already: http://moddevices.com/ )
And honestly, Bitwig has completely switched up the whole situation. Right now I'm running Bitwig on Arch and it's beastly. The only thing I miss from Logic are those excellent MIDI editing tools, non-destructive quantize. I'm also missing my favorite LV2 plugins (ZynAddSubFX). But Bitwig has plenty of synths and a fully modular system for creating endless sounds, so I'm set.
Don't need or want Apple at this point. I'm good :)
It works well for me under wine.
The cost of Reaper, an i5 thinkpad with KXStudio, 8 gigs of ram and terabyte hard drive is like $200. You could make a top quality album with that setup, no problem.
Bitwig etc.. runs on Windows as well, but also you get the benefits of using other VST and VSTi vendors.
If more organizations/companies were to invest in Linux as a serious audio platform, I imagine it could really blossom. The foundations are all there. It's the user interfaces, the workflows and the software design that needs work. And the presence of developers who get non-linear, modular, audio workflows and musicality.
As for plugins, there are a few VSTs that have been ported to Linux via (distrho)[http://distrho.sourceforge.net/]. Bitwig has amazing internal instruments. So I'm set for now. It'd be amazing if more plugin developers made VST/LV2 builds for Linux. Now that Bitwig is around, maybe more will start showing up. U-he has some public betas of linux versions of their plugins.
I wish there were something like a Blender Institute for Linux music software. Or... if the Blender Institute just started making linux music production software :)
If you are making linear, arranged music, Ardour definitely has all the features to produce it. Although I can't speak for usability or stability, cause I never really invested the time to learn it.
I think of Ardour as akin to Pro Tools (which I can't stand BTW!). It's linear and clunky. It's got powerful busing features, a timeline with all kinds of markers and annotations. The stuff I did on Ardour always came out sounding real clean.
It's funny, I did most of my work on QTractor. It has a dead simple interface, easily modifyable shortcuts, and is surprisingly powerful. The only thing is that it's missing an obvious bounce feature that works for MIDI instrument plugins. So I'd have to route my master track to a "bounce" track, then record to that.
Linux is missing a quality, simple, open source non-linear sequencer (audio/MIDI). Something like Seq24 crossed with SooperLooper. Something like Ableton or Bitwig, but just the cliplauncher part.
That's why I caved in and went to Bitwig. I was going through some stuff and just needed to make some music. There's also something to be said about having lots of presets and samples ready to go. On Linux, you gotta bring your own settings.
Lately I've been using Arch. Arch's audio packages are also very well configured. There's even a Bitwig package in the AUR. That's how I installed Bitwig :) It's the best of both worlds.
They're lucky Microsoft has been asleep at the wheel for the last few years or actively shooting itself in the foot (Windows 8). But MS seems to be getting its act together lately.
Microsoft had an identity crisis for a number of years where they weren't quite sure where they should go, but their move back to being a platform (with regards to Azure) and making sure that the rest of their lines support that work is starting to pay off. Of course, they do need to tighten things up, especially around Windows... That division in particular seems to be trying to move too quickly and it's showing.
Even as a relatively new developer to the Apple space, in the time I've worked in iOS/OSX the quality has taken a stark dip in terms of stability and functionality, and seems to coincide with Jobs no longer being at the company. I think having one guy who is in a position to yell at literally anyone for doing less then stellar work is an asset no company appreciates until it's gone, and we all know that Tim Cook is in no fashion at all a Steve Jobs, he can't put people to task like that.
For a while, I thought they were chasing IOS marketshare hard, and would come back to fixing the desktop. But I'm beginning to wonder if that isn't the intent; I'm sure the 30k-foot-view financials says OS X is now the second-class product.
The problem is that OS X is the generative platform. Writers and programmers and musicians and designers and artists use Macs to produce. And a lot of these folks (me included) are getting restless.
I'll be fine - honestly, I only own one OS X box today, and my main personal desktop is Linux. I'd be annoyed for a while if I had to switch to a Linux laptop, but vim is portable, and if they continue to baby-proof the OS at the expense of automation and traditional Unix tools, it will be less annoying that staying put.
If the plan is to bring iOS to the point where, say, Ableton and Pro Tools runs sufficiently well there, then they better get on that before the OS where those tools do run rots out from under them. And if that isn't the plan, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be very curious to know what it is.
On the one hand I hugely prefer macOS over Windows. But macOS now has regular showstopper bugs that simply shouldn't be there - like the issue with AU validation, and a bug in Yosemite that made it impossible to connect more than a small number of USB devices.
Also, the Mac Pro is so poorly specified it's competing with it's own predecessors. It makes more sense to buy an ancient "cheesegrater" 5,1 Pro and upgrade it with a new processor than to buy the new Darth Waste Bin model - not just because of the basic spec and performance, but because the new Pro has no PCIe slots, some popular high-end music hardware comes on PCIe cards, and adding an external PCIe/Thunderbolt card cage doubles the cost.
Windows actually has a broader range of VSTs available than macOS.
So I'm not surprised pro users are switching to Windows. I don't love the idea, but if Apple can't offer the performance the market needs, users have no choice but to switch.
If your "only iOS matters" hypothesis is correct than Apple only cares about generative OSX for generating iOS apps. That means keeping XCode working at all costs, and they can safely ignore every other use. I suspect that they understand that apart from students using Pages to write papers, MS and Google own the office productivity space.
The only remaining code to write are highly proprietary front-ends and the occasional mega-backend.
The masses follow the makers. The makers are dissatisfied. Pay attention.
Any iMac or MacBook Pro from the last 5 years is sufficient for any pro audio workflow. A Mac Pro is still sufficient and is way overkill. A lot of people can be pretty productive on an iPad too. New Macs are coming, Apple isn't abandoning the Mac.
I just updated to macOS Sierra and all my pro audio equipment has either kept working as is or the manufacturer released a driver update within days of the macOS Sierra release.
But the article is not just about the headphone jack, there's an additional half-dozen considerations that you haven't said anything to address other than "works for me." I can assure you that this is not everyone's experience.
Just a few days ago, Pro Tools popped up the annoying "A CPU Overload Has Occurred" dialog box while I was working on a mix. Mid-2015 rMBP, 2.5 GHz.
It was a pretty simple session, too - nothing that breaks any rules, like reverbs on inserts. 12 or so tracks and three stereo effects (on their own busses).
I'm amazed every day at how much capability my MBP puts into my hands, but it is not without limitations. To say it's sufficient for any pro audio workflow is a bit of a stretch.
It makes me consider buying a Mac Mini or Mac Pro for audio work, but I can't justify the cost right now, since audio is mainly a hobby and my MBP works fine for most of what I do (multi-track recording live events with Dante).
I was drawn to the MBP when I switched in 2009 because of the build quality, the OS, and its ability to handle professional workflows, but it seems that they're abandoning that use case. My favorite machine of all time is still my '09 Core 2 Duo MBP.
The extra portability is nice, but if I wanted portability over power, I would have bought an Air (or I suppose a Macbook now).
* CPU up to i7 6920, or Xeon E3-1575M v5
* memory up to 64GB, ECC or non-
* Thunderbolt 3
* up to 2 x NVMe SSD
* 4K display
EDIT: the HP ZBook Studio G3 also looks quite good
“On February 20, 2015, Microsoft released an update for Windows Defender which removes Superfish.”
Microsoft has to uninstall the malware that Lenovo had put on the computers it had sold. Lenovo did not remove it on its own. Let that sink in.
Pro audio workflows can include more than a hundred tracks, all running demanding plugins.
A MacBook Pro can be good enough for bedroom studios and simple mixes without many tracks, but no one is going to record and mix a film score on one.
My original comment below :
"...this reveals a deeper, more cultural problem at Apple. The inability to ship OS builds to developers in time for them to adapt..."
I'm a developer and sorry but... no. The first developer preview of Sierra has been available since June 13th. That's 3 full months, and indeed you must have noticed most developers of non-audio apps have spent the summer shipping updates.
Yet somehow in the audio world, all hell breaks loose come September each year, it seems plug-in developers only start looking at the new OS the same day as their customers, and they scramble to make panicked "DO NOT UPGRADE YET !" statements. Not being ready on day 1 is unfortunate, not having started working on it is simply unprofessional, sorry.
But the worst part is that they manage to get away with it, because most of their customers (musicians are notoriously conservative with their computers) nod in approval and go "yeah yeah don't worry, I'm still on MacOS-from-8-years-ago anyway. F* Apple always breaking stuff" (just look at the forums if you don't believe me)
It simply doesn't have to be this way in most cases, and this is the real issue you should be talking about IMHO.
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...
Quick, simple and easy to run and test with.
You make it sound as if Apple is re-architecting the audio system with each beta update. But all that happens long before an OS hits beta: Apple's betas are by and large feature-frozen. There's simply no excuse for a major vendor like Steinberg or Native Instruments to delay testing until there are literally computers already shipping that will not reliably run their software.
Of course, this is even more true of Windows 10, where Microsoft have decided they want to force updates on users on their chosen schedule - and of course just like with macOS, newer hardware can't run older versions of Windows. Have we reached the point where no major OS is suitable for actual, productive creative use?
Win 10 is abhorrent in so many it's impossible to list them all. But it's increasingly usable and mostly stable. Some pro users can live with the horror. Others can't.
Linux is still a hobbyist, experimenter, and IT infrastructure OS. It's good at all the above, and it's being used for some creative pro applications. But it's not a straightforward option for anyone who just wants to get on with paid professional creative work.
It would be interesting if one of the main audio sequencers appeared on Linux. Bitwig is already there. But if (say) Ableton Live switched, it would start a mass stampede away from macOS.
Unfortunately Linux fragmentation makes that unlikely.
So - no, we do not currently have a rock solid no-nonsense OS for professional use, and it's looking less and likely that we'll have one any time soon.
This is ridiculous in 2016. But here we are.
For instance, there was absolutely zero reason to release an “update” to GarageBand that outright removed a substantial number of features and destroyed backward-compatibility (I don’t think I had a single song that even SOUNDED THE SAME after opening it in the “improved” version; many settings were just thrown out, or hard to find because they were just moved for no good reason). This is just plain stupid management: inept decision-making that shows a complete lack of respect for the financial and time investments made by previous customers.
And hardware decisions have felt the same. Not only was the Mac Pro not what Pros really needed but even the damn web site for the thing made it impossible to really understand what the machine could actually do. I didn’t want to sit through animations and fancy scrolling just to find a data sheet. You have to have end-to-end, seamless understanding of what you’re trying to do in an endeavor, and this is clueless behavior.
And one last factor makes me wonder: when Apple does so well in the stock market, what does that do to employees? It probably doesn’t take a lot of massive profit from stocks to make people reconsider their jobs; I figure there have to be a few new millionaires who just decided to leave, causing perhaps entirely new teams to take over some projects.
But it's true! At least you could install updates when you wanted, not when your remote masters in Redmond decided.
I'm a loyal Logic user (10 years) and a "pro" musician. I started getting worried when Pro X came out. The weird prosumer approach, their poor attempts at beating NI at synths, it all had me worried. Logic used to be fairly bare-bones by comparison but I never had to deal with the kind of bullshit Pro X has thrown at me: whole projects developing strange audio glitches for no apparent reason, constant missing audio files (even on newer tracks), meaningless warnings, system overloads on simple tracks, crashes, you name it. Maybe I was less bitchy when I was 20, but damn, it seems that things have gone downhill.
That doesn't even start on the hardware: $1200 for a computer with sub-optimal hardware pains the engineer in me, especially when the thing breaks every couple of years and has to go to the sandboxed repair store to get fixed.
Like many others in this thread, I leaving for Linux next time and I guess I'll make due with whatever they have.
I wish they would sort out the AU validation though.
I don't use Apple headphones or Apple Music - not sure if they have much to do with "Pro Music", whatever that is.
Back in 1997 I commented on the AOL Apple Forum that Apple should dump the creative community in favor of the larger consumer market. At the time the creative market represented about 1.5% of total computer usage. Mac market share was 2%, but only in the US. Everywhere else it was non-existent.
Not that I had anything to do with it (I didn't) Apple did just that, and today its the world's largest, most profitable tech company. Beyond computers, Apple manufactures iPhones, iPads, Beats headsets, Ear Buds and Air Buds, Apple Watches, and Apple TV. Apple also offers on demand movies, TV and music, not to mention books and news.
Twenty years ago you couldn't open a Mac catalog without be deluged by creative programs and accessories Adobe was a big deal, today not so much. Most people recognize Adobe as the developer of a crap media player
I want to thank you very much for supporting Apple back in the day. I did too, with a 27 person electronics and software development (Linux) firm. It was hard back then because field support was virtually non-existent (unless you did graphics).
Frankly, the creative industry's need for specialized softwares and extremely powerful computers makes me wonder if you and Apple haven't come to a fork in the road, where each goes their own way.
I wish you the very best.
However at least Jobs told the collected heads of the VFX houses to go fuck themselves in person.
Would help a lot if (a) Apple had longer lead times to actually get things right internally before they went to beta and (b) beta cycles were a bit longer and (c) companies didn't have to do this every damn year.
On the other side... what are the benefits of having yearly regimented releases again?
It's what consumers expect. If Apple ditched the yearly upgrade model there'd probably be a shitstorm of bad PR and people complaining about how it's not just their hardware offerings that are getting out of date, now the OS is too.
Ive used various mac/windows based music platforms over the years since around 1997 and still think Mac is the better platform for audio. Heres why: 1) ios/osx has a baked in low latency audio framework in Core Audio which means even on board audio can run at < 10ms round trip latency 2) Logic is still the most solid DAW Ive ever used 3) Windows has yet to offer a compelling Audio experience with out serious hardware.
I will agree that the new mac pro was a big step backwards from the previous version. I had an 8 core mac pro from 2008 and that was the perfect music pc. Im sure the new one is fine, but I dont care about the aesthetics of the computer as long as I can depend on it to record a session and not fail.
The Native Instruments issues dont really surprise me and in my experience with that company their software quality ranges from buggy to mediocre (Komplete 1-8) to the point were I could not find a compelling reason to continue using their software. I could certainly understand a company acting defensive and blaming the OS manufacturer when they are flooded with bug reports.
To that I would also offer a counterpoints of Propellerheads Reason. Their software is consistently bug free and solid performing. So it does not seem to really be a "Mac" problem. I currently use a universal audio apollo 8 and that also performs solidly via the lightning interface at near real time latency. Point being, its possible to make solid software for mac.
Anyway, I don't think that the mac is perfect for audio, and the situation may be worse for video, it sounds like the new mac pro is a dud for pro users, which is disappointing.
I grew up with Macs, but when I learned how to manipulate PCs and, to the best of my ability, overcome a lot of the inherent issues. A lot has been budget oriented. VSTs and the like don't run on Mac, that cuts off an entire community!
[a] Also there's ASIO4ALL which runs on a high grade machine pretty dang well - not Core Audio perfect, but it's surprisingly good in my experieince. Just needs like an i5, 8GB RAM and a decent HD (works great with SSDs).
Also, Mac runs/supports VST just fine, and having coded in both VST and AU APIs they are similar enough to make porting to either platform relatively trivial(though not fool proof).
Honestly though using the guitar approach that I was favoring, even having native audio drivers wasn't my ideal "sound chain" approach - personally speaking - so I was pretty much destined to use an outside interface for modeling and whatnot, among other approaches. I wasn't an "out of the box" kind of person but understand why Mac has that particular advantage, but for my not-genuinely-pro under-the-hood level I could still tell PC had equal footing to do powerful things that are more defined by the skill of the user than the inherent capabilities or quality of the platform. Basically a wash, thus not really a Mac advantage except in a kind of narrow defined view, a good one though.
ProTools? its pretty much the industry standard and it also supports your point that its unlikely to be the OS at fault - since most studios i've been in are running mac pros and protools without any issues.
Though protools requires some external hardware iirc
After a few false starts, final Cut Pro X is clearly the way of the future. It reduces our production time by 25%.
El Capitan was stable on all of our machines. We are still testing Sierra and don't expect to deploy for a good while.
For people who happen to not know what a real-time OS is, see [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_operating_system
I'm not sure if your question is serious or not,but just in case it is: you can listen to poorer quality 'preview' while editing and render the final, full-quality audio in slower than realtime.
Also, in a recording situation, I could imagine that the artists want live feedback.
That said, you could use tricks, like making the output reverb whenever there's a buffer underrun.
http://www.rossbencina.com/code/real-time-audio-programming-...
They solve it in modern times by just having fast enough hardware with a bunch of slack for whatever crap might come along in the background, and allowing for a couple ms of buffer. Multicore helps.
It's tiny in comparison to the consumer market.
And the revenue for Macbooks is on par with iPad, and less than a third of the iPhone. They have not been a priority for Apple for many years now.
Also, one of the advantages of developing pro art products is that they can be siphoned into consumer products or fun "freebies". The audio engine in Logic Pro for instance is the same as what is used in Garageband. With everyone taking photos and video on their phones these days there's probably even more opportunity in those areas.
Apple was the first for all the big impact technologies of the recent years: ultra high def displays, new hard drive technolgies, and the latest wifi standards.
But what do you want now? A new processor? They're only delivering slight marginal improvements in the i5/i7 mobile range. More RAM? Yeah, apple could offer 32GB models, but that's not relevant to the music industry. Everything else is about as good as it gets.
There just aren't laptop scale improvements in technology as of late.
But you may have hit upon the real disconnect. Apple is waiting for new shiny features, while Pros simply want things that make it easier (and in the case of VR, possible) to do their jobs.
Edit: I meant VR, not 3D.
VR might eventually become mainstream, but in the foreseeable future it will be a niche at best. Perhaps useful in a few narrow verticals (e.g, architecture, engineering and product design).
Are you really saying that status symbol is not a MASSIVE part of Apple's marketing strategy?
But look at an Apple classic ads like the "There's an app for that" series. Nothing really aspirational or status-reaching about those ads.
Of course it is silly to assume most of Apple's sales come from people looking for the wow factor and ignore the Apple appealed to geek hearts as well early on.
Anecdotally, I still think a significant number of people outside the highly selective HN crowd view Apple as a status symbol or a go-to. Doesn't mean apple doesn't make subjectively great products though
Edit: I don't mind the downvotes if I have said something stupid but could I get some clarification here? I'm typing this on a MacBook so I clearly like Apple products but it seems like branding and marketing are fairly important to Apple, otherwise they probably wouldn't spend billions of dollars on ad campaigns.
Maybe your point was that the financials are no longer there to support pro gear or creativity or even OS X as a whole because phones make them more money. If it was, though, you didn't express it.
And I agree with the fact that many people are buying them because they're simply status symbols, but many more people buy them because they see it as the easiest choice. Your (average, run-of-the-mill) grandma's not going to be able to choose one of many Android phones unless her grandson tells her which one to pick. At that point she might just walk into an Apple store and out with a new phone. If that was part of your point, you also didn't express that.
So I think you're losing points because your points aren't all too accurate or visible (at least from my point of view) and because, even if they were, they have very little to do about the deprecation of Apple's tooling for semi-/pro users.
In my defense though, my comment was a response to another poster who seemed to imply that no one buys Apple products due to it being a status symbol, at least that's how I interpret the line "Just stop with the status symbol crap". Said poster then uses their own reason for purchasing a Mac to completely dismiss the possibility that the broader market might base their purchasing decisions on less logical reasoning.
My main confusion with the downvotes stemmed from the fact that while my comment may not have had much to do with the original topic, I thought it was appropriately related to the post I was responding to, and said post arguably had as little to do with the original topic as mine, while not garnering similar downvotes.
In any case, thanks again for the explanation. I'll try and do a better job of staying on topic and crafting my responses.
Me personally, I ask for Macbooks because they mostly don't offer shitty products as their entry models. And even though I'm a fan of business laptops such as Thinkpad and Latitude, every single time I asked for one management starts to cheap out with terrible TN screens, minimum RAM and spinning drives.
So which keyboard prevents touch typing?