Future of Logic Pro and Cubase on Mac

[chk071]

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.

Feel free to send me a link then.

[tooneba]

So many effort into word salad but no link. Typical apple talk.

[BONES]

If MS had the expertise to create their own ARM based chips like Apple then you would have a point.

Big assumption there, don't you think? Very typical of Mac users. I imagine Microsoft has the resources to do whatever they like. After all, they designed their own silicon for HoloLens so if they had a reason to design their own processors, I'm sure they could. I can't 'see why it would make sense for them to do it, though, whereas it makes it much easier for Apple to wall their customers in even more securely and will save them a fortune in development costs going forward.

For one MS wasn't even really trying and the Windows platform is based on legacy support.

If you are going to offer an opinion, you'd be best served doing a little research first. Microsoft's ARM efforts don't live in the past, half-a-dozen OEMs are currently offering ARM-based Windows 10 laptops/2-in-1s.

Regarding battery life, just cause something isn't an issue for you, doesn't mean it isn't an issue for someone else. Your experience is not the measure for everyone.

Gee, do you think maybe that's why I framed it as a f**king question?

In my case, most of the time laptop battery life is not important as I have it plugged in. But sometimes I am using my laptop without access to power and then a significantly longer battery life is an added bonus.

That's just why it has a battery and, believe me, I have probably had far greater need of good battery life than you.

Plus of course less battery use for the same task means less heat and less fan noise.

This is another bullshit point Who give a flying f**k about laptop fan noise? With the fans going full-bore, my laptop is quieter than my fridge or the fan I have on to keep me cool while I'm working. Even at work, I can hear the building's air-con over the noise from my laptop fan. It's another one of those bullshit marketing things Apple makes a fuss of that make absolutely no difference to 99% of users in 99% of situations.

The Apple Silicon Macs are not using a stripped down version of OSX.

Yet but how long do you think it will be before iOS and macOS converge? Otherwise, what's the point of this move?

[risome]

Well, Logic is the traditional DAW of choice for Mac users, isn't it? So I can't see why Logic - of all DAWs - should disappear from Macs.

That's wishful thinking, not logical thinking (pun intended). Just look at what Apple did to Final Cut Pro, an application that they created from the ground up to lure professional users. They threw their pro customers under a bus in the pursuit of more app sales. It wouldn't surprise me at all if, one day, they ditched Logic to concentrate on Garage Band.

BTW, what are the upcoming changes to Macs?

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.

I use Ableton and Logic on my Mac Pro 2019 Tower both are great, why restrict yourself to just one DAW

Because I have work to finish and I don't have time to be moving projects between competing products with almost zero cross-compatibility. When I move a project from Cubase to Studio One, for example, I throw out countless hours of time spent getting the mix right and have to pretty much start again from scratch. That's not something I'd do unless I really, really had to.

I use Ableton for certain projects and Logic for others .I don't mix and match.Works for me:-)

[machinesworking]

This is another bullshit point Who give a flying f**k about laptop fan noise? With the fans going full-bore, my laptop is quieter than my fridge or the fan I have on to keep me cool while I'm working. Even at work, I can hear the building's air-con over the noise from my laptop fan. It's another one of those bullshit marketing things Apple makes a fuss of that make absolutely no difference to 99% of users in 99% of situations.

The Apple Silicon Macs are not using a stripped down version of OSX.

Yet but how long do you think it will be before iOS and macOS converge? Otherwise, what's the point of this move?

I think you're just jumping to conclusions as much as you accuse other people of here.
You're the only musician I've ever heard of that doesn't care about fan noise, end of. Nothing more to say, you're just dead wrong about this. I live on an arterial and I still can't stand the noise of the laptop here, the desktop never makes noise really.

The point of the move is thermals, and Apple over the years have made a low power Arm based chip into something that's capable of competing with AMD and Intel. We will see how far they take it, but early reports coming in are beyond positive. Their three least powerful devices now with M1 chips are competing directly with the best mobile chips Intel puts out etc.

I don't expect them to keep whatever lead they have for long, that's not how tech goes usually, but in ten years I would be really surprised if it wasn't the case that all of us weren't on some variant of Arm considering the initial scores coming in from gaming, photoshop clones, and Geekbench tests.

Don't be short sighted, just because foo foo boutique Apple does it in no way invalidates it as a technological breakthrough. They have to do something with all the money they've made selling us overpriced designer wheels.

[jancivil]

donno why anyone at this juncture would put their energy into replying to people who have demonstrated over years in here their loathing of an OS platform, who need to fabricate a bunch of lame stories about it and its users, purely trolling (disrupting) pretty much any thread oriented to that platform

EDIT rather than bump: I'm prone to doing a lot of that, feeding the troll but well...

[apoclypse]

Nevermind not worth the hassle.

[revvy]

donno why anyone at this juncture would put their energy into replying to people who have demonstrated over years in here their loathing of an OS platform, who need to fabricate a bunch of lame stories about it and its users, purely trolling (disrupting) pretty much any thread oriented to that platform

Sometimes it's just a bit of naughty fun to tap on the cage and wait for the barking to start.

Although his constant 'all Apple users are c**ts' narrative obviously shines a light on him rather than them.

[machinesworking]

donno why anyone at this juncture would put their energy into replying to people who have demonstrated over years in here their loathing of an OS platform, who need to fabricate a bunch of lame stories about it and its users, purely trolling (disrupting) pretty much any thread oriented to that platform

For fun, he’s not going away, if he concentrates on those of us who reply to his rants maybe the rest of you can have a rational measured conversation.

[SamDi]

OK, let‘s come back to normal discussion

1. I am at the moment pretty skeptical, that the current M1 shall exceed the Intel platform in terms of speed and of course pretty curious what will be the outcome of practical tests and several benchmarks the next weeks. I wonder, that they still offer the Intel based Mac Pro 13“ as the higher priced variants. So when the M1 is so superior to the Intel i5-7, why they just equip the low-price-versions with it?
2. I feel pissed, that they cropped 2 Thunderbolt interfaces, so at the moment they have at maximum 2 together with M1. When they keep this practice to castrate even higher priced version (as they did with the iPhone to drop the charging adapter), then I need to think about going back to Windows (what I do anyway with each decision, what should be the next laptop, but the last years the Mac won always)
3. I can imagine, that in general it‘s bad for us music makers. Going to Intel in 2006 was pretty covenient for us, because it reduced the barrier for software makers, who developed mainly for Windows to also compile it for Mac then. This barrier now will get higher and I expect, the one or other small VST developer could drop now Mac support. Apple expects pretty much from SW-companies supporting MacOS. Last time big issues with Catalina, now switching to M1 and Big Sur, which also seems to run into trouble - Eventide already announced, that they are not yet Big Sur compatible. I would say, Apple is overexaggerating at the moment and I would not wonder, if this would lead to get less SW for Mac in the future...

[sabiwa]

OK, let‘s come back to normal discussion
I am at the moment pretty skeptical, that the current M1 shall exceed the Intel platform in terms of speed and of course pretty curious what will be the outcome of practical tests and several benchmarks the next weeks. I wonder, that they still offer the Intel based Mac Pro 13“ as the higher priced variants. So when the M1 is so superior to the Intel i5-7, why they just equip the low-price-versions with it?
I feel pissed, that they cropped 2 Thunderbolt interfaces, so at the moment they have at maximum 2 together with M1. When they keep this practice to castrate even higher priced version (as they did with the iPhone to drop the charging adapter), then I need to think about going back to Windows (what I do anyway with each decision, what should be the next laptop, but the last years the Mac won always)
I can imagine, that in general it‘s bad for us music makers. Going to Intel in 2006 was pretty covenient for us, because it reduced the barrier for software makers, who developed mainly for Windows to also compile it for Mac then. This barrier now will get higher and I expect, the one or other small VST developer could drop now Mac support. Apple expects pretty much from SW-companies supporting MacOS. Last time big issues with Catalina, now switching to M1 and Big Sur, which also seems to run into trouble - Eventide already announced, that they are not yet Big Sur compatible. I would say, Apple is overexaggerating at the moment and I would not wonder, if this would lead to get less SW for Mac in the future...

Good points. The lack of interfaces would finally force me to export all my external sample libraries to internal SSD (just for the convenience) and that decision costs a lot of extra. After 80 days my Logic trial version (10.5.1) will be gone forever and I'm forced to upgrade on Catalina if I decide to go for it. However, Cubase 11 works perfectly on Mojave

[machinesworking]

OK, let‘s come back to normal discussion

1. I am at the moment pretty skeptical, that the current M1 shall exceed the Intel platform in terms of speed and of course pretty curious what will be the outcome of practical tests and several benchmarks the next weeks. I wonder, that they still offer the Intel based Mac Pro 13“ as the higher priced variants. So when the M1 is so superior to the Intel i5-7, why they just equip the low-price-versions with it?

The various benchmarks coming back are all really promising, it's performing more like a desktop chip in most cases. Hopefully we see some real DAW numbers soon.

They're using one chip across their absolute low end models, this is what you would call a public beta with little downside. The chips are drastically faster seemingly than the models they replaced, so quirks of releasing tens of thousands into the wild can be addressed before true performance machines are brought out. It's not what I want of course, but it makes total sense from a marketing and strategic standpoint. Tests are having their 4 performance and 4 efficiency core chip near matching matching multi, and beating single core results of their 8 core i9 Macbook Pro. Impressive results and time to tune out any weird things that might pop up in the wild.

[*] I feel pissed, that they cropped 2 Thunderbolt interfaces, so at the moment they have at maximum 2 together with M1. When they keep this practice to castrate even higher priced version (as they did with the iPhone to drop the charging adapter), then I need to think about going back to Windows (what I do anyway with each decision, what should be the next laptop, but the last years the Mac won always)

I get it and sort of don't. I do like at least three ports on a laptop, but at home the Macbook Pro is hooked up to a 14 port thunderbolt hub. The Mac Pro has two 7 port USB3 hubs attached to it. Four isn't nearly enough in my studio, and on the road I try to use two anyway. It's all the same bus.

[*] I can imagine, that in general it‘s bad for us music makers. Going to Intel in 2006 was pretty covenient for us, because it reduced the barrier for software makers, who developed mainly for Windows to also compile it for Mac then. This barrier now will get higher and I expect, the one or other small VST developer could drop now Mac support. Apple expects pretty much from SW-companies supporting MacOS. Last time big issues with Catalina, now switching to M1 and Big Sur, which also seems to run into trouble - Eventide already announced, that they are not yet Big Sur compatible. I would say, Apple is overexaggerating at the moment and I would not wonder, if this would lead to get less SW for Mac in the future...
[/list]

Mentioned this in other places, U-He, Fabfilter, Pianotech, all are on their way. Justin is pretty confident Reaper is going to be an easy port. The weirdo did a Linux Arm port already.. for the 5 people using it. My other guess is Bitwig ports pretty quickly, being another portable core foundation across three platforms already.

a ton of developers switched to iOS over the years, and now that it's a super quick port to Mac OS, I really don't see any reason to think there's any rational reason to think Apple Silicon is going to be the death of Mac OS, quite the opposite, if Apple can actually translate some of it's performance test results into real world use, then Apple might be able to make actual claims of superiority, not just aesthetic.

Think of it, basically it shouldn't be much of an issue for Apple to come out with 8 or 12 performance core coupled with 4-8 efficiency core chips that stomp every mobile chip by large margins, especially if the early numbers are anything to go by with this mere 4 performance 4 efficiency core.

So yeah, not right now maybe, but in a year, things are going to get interesting. Probably going to see a lot of scrambling from AMD and Intel, hard to say. What really will be interesting is if and what Apple may do with the Mac Pro. I mean already you can get a 64 core Ryzen, not really a rational DAW PC, but I've definitely thought about the 24 core version, so where does Apple go with that?

[machinesworking]

Other notes, MOTU MIDI devices seem to work according to them, RME have working class compliant interfaces. So hardware is starting to show up.

[egbert]

To me it would seem sensible to wait and see about the performance and suitability of the new platform for the tasks you want to work on. Lots of users here seem to like the iPad and iPad Pro as a portable platform for music making. I can imagine they will love these new things.
If your current projects involve a dual Xeon workstation with 64GB plus of RAM and extensive i/o to storage and studio size audio interfaces then I wouldn't count my chickens.

Apple has their own ideas about marketing. When StevieJ was at the helm and they moved from Motorola to IBM PowerPC G5s, the new models were touted as "supercomputers" and the legality of exporting them was raised in the marketing materials as a potential problem because, no doubt somebody jong il would be designing nukes on them next week if they got out. These were things with less processing power and RAM compared to your current iPhone.

Steve claimed the next model would have massively more clockspeed - just because Steve declared in the manner of Jean-Luc Picard that it should be so. Never happened. When the successor, the last PowerPC model, was finally released it was referred to as the leafblower model because the hand-picked CPUs they basically overclocked chewed so much energy they needed massive noisy cooling.

The voices of experience in this thread have watched the previous platform changes go by and are advocating not slapping down your hard-earned on the first model of its type - liable to have issues - and waiting to see what actually suits your purposes. They will sort things out eventually but the priorities of Apple nowadays are with the mass market - there's nothing niche about iPhones and they are now defending their position as a multi-trillion dollar company in a competitive market.

[machinesworking]

They will sort things out eventually but the priorities of Apple nowadays are with the mass market - there's nothing niche about iPhones and they are now defending their position as a multi-trillion dollar company in a competitive market.

Computers aren't a niche market.

Waiting for the second generation is generally smart, but even then these sorts of things aren't written in stone, I bought the second generation Powerbook when it came out, which specifically for audio underperformed compared to the first generation it replaced. (Motorola had a smaller L3 cache in the faster chip)

Mostly it's obvious this is a "test run", so anyone buying these will be crushed when they see what they release in a couple months. These devices ere their least powerful models, and IMO look to be skunked by what comes next.

Plus we have no idea how fast or aggressively the MacBook Air throttles down under load. So yeah waiting for some real world results is smart.