Future of Logic Pro and Cubase on Mac

[pdxindy]

Are you serious? They just launched their new ARM-based Macbook Air, with promises of Macbook Pros going the same way later in the year. i.e. They just turned Mac laptops into oversized iPads with no touchscreen.

You mean they just made their laptops faster, with significantly better battery life, they still run OSX but can also run iOS apps as well... Nice win for us Mac users... there are a number of iOS apps I look forward to using.

The New Apple Silicon Mac Mini is showing a 50% cpu improvement for single core in early tests... very impressive.

On what sort of tasks? Floating point stuff? Apple performance claims have a long history of hyperbolae - what really matters in the end is how does it perform on the specific tasks that relate to an area of work.

If you want to run a zillion plugins in a DAW mix, how will it compete with a Ryzen 5950 or whatever Intel can cook up to compete with that? That is the standard right now. And graphics hardware is not limited to the Iris stuff Intel shoehorned into it's CPUs - as Bones points out that market if full of mature products with much more power.

Yeah... Apple tends to over-claim improvement... but Apple is saying higher numbers than the test I quoted which was a geekbench test... just a preliminary test like I said... 50% better for single core and 30% better for multi-core on the new Mac Mini compared to the high end Intel Mac Mini.

[pdxindy]

Cubase upgrades are paid for each version, while Logic is not (currently)....so you'd save €100 a year with Logic.

If you ignore the price of the dongle, that is.

Does not matter if you are already a Mac user.

How often do you buy a Mac?

Every 4 years... then gift the old one to someone who cannot afford a computer who will then use it for some years more.

[pdxindy]

Even an AMD 3950X can't do the with an 1080TI Nvidia card

That's because a 1080TI is a low-level gaming card, it' not designed to edit video with. For that stuff you need nVidia Quadro (or whatever they just changed the name to).

In other words, you need an nVidia Quadro to keep up with the M1's on chip graphics

Bodes well for Apple then

[bungle]

Check the in house Affinity benchmarks, I was off the Apple wagon in recent years, but their benchmarks for Affinity suite is gonna drag me right back in, not so much for audio because of the signed shit show and the amount of plugins that just wont get updated to Arm, and you can't run an Arm DAW with Rosetta wrapped plugins by the looks of things.

[ozinga]

Cubase upgrades are paid for each version, while Logic is not (currently)....so you'd save €100 a year with Logic.

If you ignore the price of the dongle, that is.

Does not matter if you are already a Mac user.

How often do you buy a Mac?

6 to 7,8 years

[pdxindy]

Check the in house Affinity benchmarks, I was off the Apple wagon in recent years, but their benchmarks for Affinity suite is gonna drag me right back in, not so much for audio because of the signed shit show and the amount of plugins that just wont get updated to Arm, and you can't run an Arm DAW with Rosetta wrapped plugins by the looks of things.

I just noticed all my Affinity apps have an update (and ready for Apple Silicon)... where did you see the benchmarks?

[egbert]

Apple makes margins around 40% on hardware. The competition is low single figures. So when you pay the apple tax you are subsidising their software division as well as their coke consumption. You have already paid for the software by buying and maintaining and buying accessories and peripherals for the hardware, there is no real saving. There is no free lunch.

[pdxindy]

This is what Affinity said about their updates using the M1:

"This is great news for our users because the architecture of the M1, particularly having such a high-performance GPU with unified memory with the CPU, is perfect for professional creative applications. The advantages are particularly noticeable when working on documents with thousands of pixel layers, vector objects and text. Edits to pixel layers are best handled on the GPU, while vector and text on the CPU, so when you have unified memory, it allows much faster handling of these complex documents."

"With our apps now primed for this transition, Mac customers with M1 can expect a more responsive user experience with respect to painting, pixel editing, filter effects, document rendering and more. It also enables many more elements like adjustment layers and live filters to be maintained before performance suffers—allowing for a more non-destructive workflow, even on the most complex of documents.

To sum it up, M1 makes our apps run faster, smoother and feel more responsive than ever before (we’ve already even seen speed increases of over 3x faster running on the new MacBook Air). It’s definitely a big step forward for Mac, and we can’t wait to see how the rest of the Mac range develops with Apple silicon in the future."

[chk071]

Apple makes margins around 40% on hardware.

Just wondering: How do you know that so precisely?

I doubt that even Apple employees who are not deep into management know such things. It's really not as easy as getting someone to calculate the single component's prices, and do some estimation on logistic and marketing expenses.

I don't have a doubt that Apple's margins are higher than anyone else's. I just wouldn't even a dare to assume some figures.

[enroe]

Apple makes margins around 40% on hardware.

Just wondering: How do you know that so precisely?

I doubt that even Apple employees who are not deep into management know such things. It's really not as easy as getting someone to calculate the single component's prices, and do some estimation on logistic and marketing expenses.

I don't have a doubt that Apple's margins are higher than anyone else's. I just wouldn't even a dare to assume some figures.

No no. Since Apple is included in the Dow Jones, everyone can look at
quarterly annual reports and see the exact list of income and expenses
there.

So everyone who wants to know will find it. For musicians, however,
these are usually too many numbers ...

[chk071]

Apple makes margins around 40% on hardware.

Just wondering: How do you know that so precisely?

I doubt that even Apple employees who are not deep into management know such things. It's really not as easy as getting someone to calculate the single component's prices, and do some estimation on logistic and marketing expenses.

I don't have a doubt that Apple's margins are higher than anyone else's. I just wouldn't even a dare to assume some figures.

No no. Since Apple is included in the Dow Jones, everyone can look at
quarterly annual reports and see the exact list of income and expenses
there.

So everyone who wants to know will find it. For musicians, however,
these are usually too many numbers ...

Margins are highly variable depending on where you are selling, and also from product to product. How would they even offer some figures, and what does it have to do at all with those annual reports?

If anything, what egbert stated is guess work, nothing more nothing less.

[egbert]

Apple makes margins around 40% on hardware.

Just wondering: How do you know that so precisely?

I doubt that even Apple employees who are not deep into management know such things. It's really not as easy as getting someone to calculate the single component's prices, and do some estimation on logistic and marketing expenses.

I don't have a doubt that Apple's margins are higher than anyone else's. I just wouldn't even a dare to assume some figures.

There is no need to make assumptions. Look at the market cap of apple corp, do you imagine that the economics of their operations aren't the subject of considerable interest to financial number crunchers. Apple are obliged, as a public company, to make extensive disclosures about these things. I make no assumptions. I just read the IT press.

[tha_man]

Don't do it! You'll get used to it and you'll curse every time you'll have to work on some Windows system again, you'll also curse every time Apple makes some big change in the OS or hardware which will cause you to lose some of your beloved old (and also sometimes not that old) not anymore developed software, but you'll stay with Apple anyway because it's just much better to work with (at least for audio use) than Windows system. And with Logic I don't think it's more expensive than a Windows system (again - for audio use). MacOS and it's updates are free, latest Logic cost at this moment is 200 eur for 7 years of major updates (how much would you pay for something like Ableton or Cubase with upgrades in this time?), hardware is initially somewhat more expensive (also not that much if you count in all the parts, not just CPU/GPU), but is also worth more when you sell it.

[enroe]

Margins are highly variable depending on where you are selling, and also from product to product. How would they even offer some figures, and what does it have to do at all with those annual reports?

That is exactly the content you will find in the annual reports and in their
financial statements.

[egbert]

Apple makes margins around 40% on hardware.

Just wondering: How do you know that so precisely?

I doubt that even Apple employees who are not deep into management know such things. It's really not as easy as getting someone to calculate the single component's prices, and do some estimation on logistic and marketing expenses.

I don't have a doubt that Apple's margins are higher than anyone else's. I just wouldn't even a dare to assume some figures.

No no. Since Apple is included in the Dow Jones, everyone can look at
quarterly annual reports and see the exact list of income and expenses
there.

So everyone who wants to know will find it. For musicians, however,
these are usually too many numbers ...

Margins are highly variable depending on where you are selling, and also from product to product. How would they even offer some figures, and what does it have to do at all with those annual reports?

If anything, what egbert stated is guess work, nothing more nothing less.

You seem to be concerned about whether I know what I'm talking about. I'm more worried about you mate. Is this your best work? Perhaps financial analysis isn't for you.

Really, the numbers are staring you in the face when you buy a proprietary bit of white cabling from apple corp - what do you think they pay for it? Do the math. Ker-ching!