Apple announces new Mac Mini, Air + 13" MBP featuring their own M1 chip.

[chk071]

It's pretty normal. After all, those companies provide the market and infrastructure, which is hugely beneficial to the developers offering. You can also offer your app yourself, but, that's kinda bullshit when nobody finds it.

[Passing Bye]

He's saying that

No, he didn't. What he said is that people shouldn't expect everything to run on the new architecture.

On the other hand, I just read in the u-he forum that their transition is working out quite nicely, so, it might not be that problematic. Guess Apple has built in a lot of compatiblity layers. Happy that I don't have to mess with that nonetheless.

He advised his customers against it, he didn't get developer kit Mini as Urs and many other did while ago, so he didn't even started working on it or have slight idea about it, but he will get off the shelf one as rest of us and who knows when he will be ready, his writing here doesn't show much enthusiasm about whole thing and it's rather off putting, if you feel different, as eh said, your money, your thing.

[chk071]

Markus also stated a lot that he thinks that VST3 is not a progress, and that Tone2 wouldn't offer VST3, and, whoops, all of a sudden, their new synth will be available as VST3.

As mentioned, I can see where he's coming from. Unfortunately, developing is a lot of adopting to new tech, which is tedious. So, if it's not absolutely necessary, especially OS developers should keep changes in the architecture to a minimum IMO. The problem with Apple is also that they're a company with a strong "We know what's best for you" attitude, not just towards the customers, which can be quite an issue when they're always adopting new stuff, like in this case, or the complete removal of 32-bit apps (which isn't a bad thing per se, it's just a pretty radical in terms of backwards compatiblity).

[Passing Bye]

This is businesses venture first and foremost, if he was passionate freebie developer, than go for it, but this isn’t doing his businesses much favors, but his money and all that.

[Etienne1973]

Rosetta Mac App Translation Process Can Take 20 Seconds on First Launch
Thursday November 12, 2020 12:30 pm PST by Joe Rossignol

Given that Apple's new M1 chip is designed based on ARM architecture, apps built for Intel's x86 architecture will need to be run through Apple's translation layer Rosetta 2 in order to function on Apple Silicon Macs, and this process can take some time.

Microsoft this week indicated that when launching any of its Mac apps for the first time on Apple Silicon Macs, the apps will bounce in the dock for approximately 20 seconds while the Rosetta 2 translation process is completed, with all subsequent launches being fast. This applies to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and OneDrive.

Apple's developer documentation acknowledges this matter, noting that the Rosetta 2 translation process "takes time" and that users "might perceive that translated apps launch or run more slowly at times" as a result:

If an executable contains only Intel instructions, macOS automatically launches Rosetta and begins the translation process. When translation finishes, the system launches the translated executable in place of the original. However, the translation process takes time, so users might perceive that translated apps launch or run more slowly at times.

To avoid this translation process, developers can create a universal binary for their apps, allowing them to run natively on both Apple Silicon Macs and Intel-based Macs with one executable file. Microsoft is one of many developers in the process of doing so.

A handful of apps have already been announced with universal support, including Darkroom, djay Pro AI, and OmniFocus.

The first Macs with the M1 chip will begin arriving to customers Tuesday.

Source: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/12/ro ... 0-seconds/

[Ploki]

As well as moving to 64 bit only catalina forced to drop some older versions too, despite hardware support. This pattern on mac is super annoying.
Compare it to situation with windows where old versions are working exactly like they've been working decade ago without any support.


Also I'm waiting they might force macos to apple store only and then price would go up 30%.

windows won't stay 32bit compatible forever. especially now when apple is so insanely optimized they squeeze twice as much performance from same power.

[david.beholder]

I must have misunderstood this then:

Little Update Oct 27th 2020: It's looking very good. Neither Rosetta complains about running our Intel Plug-Ins on Apple Silicon, nor do we experience issues with our natively compiled plug-ins - which, well, compile just fine (but are not yet integrated in our automated workflow). We'll post news as we go, e.g. once we have beta versions in a few weeks or so.

Yes exactly this message is: Rosetta is running our plugins, Rosetta is made for it; Plugins are compilable, well they were compilable before.
Doesn't mention anything about efforts, how long did it took, how many obstacles were workarounded, what were efforts for new low-level optimization etc.

[Ploki]

I must have misunderstood this then:

Little Update Oct 27th 2020: It's looking very good. Neither Rosetta complains about running our Intel Plug-Ins on Apple Silicon, nor do we experience issues with our natively compiled plug-ins - which, well, compile just fine (but are not yet integrated in our automated workflow). We'll post news as we go, e.g. once we have beta versions in a few weeks or so.

Yes exactly this message is: Rosetta is running our plugins, Rosetta is made for it; Plugins are compilable, well they were compilable before.
Doesn't mention anything about efforts, how long did it took, how many obstacles were workarounded, what were efforts for new low-level optimization etc.

rosetta is emulation layer.
it means they run on apple silicon but the builds are normal intel builds, not new ARM builds.
rosetta is not an effort. effort may be big sur compatibility, and effort will be native ARM builds.

[david.beholder]

windows won't stay 32bit compatible forever. especially now when apple is so insanely optimized they squeeze twice as much performance from same power.

Windows would stay as long as they want it. 32bit support doesn't cost anything for them right now.

Haven't seen any evidence of "twice as much" performance. I mean I like apple marketing buzz too but please get real.

[david.beholder]

rosetta is emulation layer.
it means they run on apple silicon but the builds are normal intel builds, not new ARM builds.
rosetta is not an effort. effort may be big sur compatibility, and effort will be native ARM builds.

I know what rosetta. Also you don't want to run diva on arm with it, you want native arm diva.
There is no word in that message on dev effort or performance difference.

[Double Tap]

I've seen some people suggesting that 3 times faster would put it around the range of a i5 10600 or a i9 10900. That would definitely tempt me back to a Mac for the first time in about 20 years, because suddenly a Mac Mini would be a cheaper option than an equivalent PC

Geekbench has the Macbook Pro and the Air up in their charts and they're showing the same scores. No Mac Mini yet, but it's starting to look the budget option for anyone wanting a high-performing consumer machine. In other news, birds are flying backwards and fish are discussing the price of 50s housewives.

[david.beholder]

And as it was said above it's far from real performance on real daws/plugins not ones where you neither know affiliation level between test maker and apple nor how much optimization was done for specific test.
Apple strategy usually is to avoiding direct competition/comparisons.

[v1o]

So current Geekbench scores are very impressive, better than previous generations with Intel chips. And AnandTech published an article based on preliminary info saying that the M1 chip might be the most performant laptop chip on the market.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/ap ... -deep-dive

I don't think its fair to characterise Arm chips as smart phone chips anymore.

[audiothing]

Windows update service is configurable one can turn off updates in couple of clicks. VST2 is running exactly the same way as 20 years ago, so not sure about what security we're talking about?

The only way I could turn off the updates was to mark my connection as metered. I'll check if I'm missing something.

Regarding security issues, there are several cases against backward compatibility.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/windows- ... aws-473058
https://joomla.digital-peak.com/blog/17 ... patibility
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281932
Just the first few I could find. I've read many over the years.
Don't get me wrong, macOS is not immune either:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellshock_(software_bug)
As you can see, yes Apple did update Mavericks, Mountain Lion, and Lion, at the time.

Why limit people with such bad solutions like old computers or vms?

VMs are quite efficient actually and offer a good layer of security as well, provided the host is powerful enough. If I remember correctly Windows XP mode is/was actually a VM.
Before 2019, we compiled and tested our Windows plugins exclusively from VMs.

As well as moving to 64 bit only catalina forced to drop some older versions too, despite hardware support. This pattern on mac is super annoying.

I understand that some may find this annoying, but as both a dev and a user, I'm quite happy about it.

Also I'm waiting they might force macos to apple store only and then price would go up 30%.

This is the only real concern that I have. If and when this might happen we'll reconsider our stand in Apple market, which, right now, is the biggest share of our revenue.

[david.beholder]

Regarding security issues, there are several cases against backward compatibility.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/windows- ... aws-473058
https://joomla.digital-peak.com/blog/17 ... patibility
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281932
Just the first few I could find. I've read many over the years.
Don't get me wrong, macOS is not immune either:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellshock_(software_bug)
As you can see, yes Apple did update Mavericks, Mountain Lion, and Lion, at the time.

Please don't confuse things: Win7-10 and MacOs 10.8-10.1x have zero os architecture changes unlike windows 95->2000 (first link), 3.1 -> 95 (third) link. Literally there is no reason why win7 apps or plugins shouldn't be working on win10. I understand issues with moving to arp, but apple is breaking compatibility every release now. It's absolutely unreasonable.

Why limit people with such bad solutions like old computers or vms?

VMs are quite efficient actually and offer a good layer of security as well, provided the host is powerful enough. If I remember correctly Windows XP mode is/was actually a VM.
Before 2019, we compiled and tested our Windows plugins exclusively from VMs.

VM doesn't work well with low latency high performance audio apps. Nobody is talking about XP btw, it was 20 years ago.

I understand that some may find this annoying, but as both a dev and a user, I'm quite happy about it.

YMMV and you can google even on this forum how man people are upset with it.

This is the only real concern that I have. If and when this might happen we'll reconsider our stand in Apple market, which, right now, is the biggest share of our revenue.

This and top level arm macs might not perform as well as top level i7/i9 macs.