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

[david.beholder]

Not sure if these benchmarks are real

Apple and Real Benchmarks in the same sentence...

[audiothing]

Unlike Microsoft Apple does not care about downward compatibility at all.

To a certain degree, I think it's a good thing. I personally feel relieved that I don't have to maintain and debug plugins for Windows XP (19 years old!) or Snow Leopard (11 years old). And of course 32 bit...

They frequently deprecate SDKs and we devs need to fix stuff with every OS update. We frequently have to rewrite large parts of our software.

We don't. But we use JUCE, so that helps a lot.

Every year we need to pay money to Apple to be an 'Apple developer'.

It's $99 (VAT included if you are in the EU). We spent more on code signing certificates for Windows. EV code signing certificates are also much more expensive ($200-$600/year). Sure, you are not forced to codesign on Windows, but it's definitely good practice.

Every 3 years we need to buy a new Mac to be able to test and develop software.

Not true. I'm writing this from a MacBook Pro 13" 2012 which is perfectly capable of building our plugins up to Catalina. An 8 years old laptop.
Anyway, do you really think that, for a software development company, buying a new computer every 3 years is too much? The new base Mac mini is $699, that would be $233/yr.

We waste months of work with making the software work on the Mac.

We don't.

Apple does not fix serious problems with audio. AU validation is broken since 3 years for example.

What serious problems? I agree that AU validation doesn't always work, but it's a simple fix. Either restart or run

Code: Select all

killall -9 AudioComponentRegistrar

Xcode crashes frequently.

Not here.

I could continue with this listing but i do not want to waste more even more time as a developer

Sure.

[Ploki]

that's it, I'm buying wires

[zvenx]

.....

Thank you!! For this.
Markus usually has experiences unlike my own with the products I beta test and convos with those developers, or as an end user (been using apple since 1988 and pc since maybe 2002), but because I am not a developer I really can't call him out on it.
I am glad you did.

rsp

[david.beholder]

Unlike Microsoft Apple does not care about downward compatibility at all.

To a certain degree, I think it's a good thing. I personally feel relieved that I don't have to maintain and debug plugins for Windows XP (19 years old!) or Snow Leopard (11 years old). And of course 32 bit...

But how it is a good thing? Every new macOS os bringing some work on a table that Windows doesn't. Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina has compatibility issues and idiosyncrasies. One can take 2010 installer on windows and run it in 2020 and it would work. One can take 32 bit daw and plugins and they would work. I mean you run your own company the way you'd like but as customer i prefer stability and longer support like on windows to catalina compatibility issues.

Every year we need to pay money to Apple to be an 'Apple developer'.

It's $99 (VAT included if you are in the EU). We spent more on code signing certificates for Windows. EV code signing certificates are also much more expensive ($200-$600/year). Sure, you are not forced to codesign on Windows, but it's definitely good practice.

You can easily get one for $200 but microsoft should follow apple way instead.

Apple does not fix serious problems with audio. AU validation is broken since 3 years for example.

What serious problems? I agree that AU validation doesn't always work, but it's a simple fix. Either restart or run

Code: Select all

killall -9 AudioComponentRegistrar

Seriously? you should run killall -9? =))))
Isn't it regular issue with Apple? I work in different business but I saw three months long email exchange about bug in Safari that in the end we found work around.

[Etienne1973]

1st Geekbench Scores





Image 1 = Single-Core
Image 2 = Multi-Core

Source: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/11/m1 ... benchmark/

[Passing Bye]

Awesome!

Gonna wait for benchmarks, if that Mini scores around 7-8k on Geekbench, it's mine.

Come to daddy

[revvy]

Unlike Microsoft Apple does not care about downward compatibility at all.

To a certain degree, I think it's a good thing. I personally feel relieved that I don't have to maintain and debug plugins for Windows XP (19 years old!) or Snow Leopard (11 years old). And of course 32 bit...

They frequently deprecate SDKs and we devs need to fix stuff with every OS update. We frequently have to rewrite large parts of our software.

We don't. But we use JUCE, so that helps a lot.

Every year we need to pay money to Apple to be an 'Apple developer'.

It's $99 (VAT included if you are in the EU). We spent more on code signing certificates for Windows. EV code signing certificates are also much more expensive ($200-$600/year). Sure, you are not forced to codesign on Windows, but it's definitely good practice.

Every 3 years we need to buy a new Mac to be able to test and develop software.

Not true. I'm writing this from a MacBook Pro 13" 2012 which is perfectly capable of building our plugins up to Catalina. An 8 years old laptop.
Anyway, do you really think that, for a software development company, buying a new computer every 3 years is too much? The new base Mac mini is $699, that would be $233/yr.

We waste months of work with making the software work on the Mac.

We don't.

Apple does not fix serious problems with audio. AU validation is broken since 3 years for example.

What serious problems? I agree that AU validation doesn't always work, but it's a simple fix. Either restart or run

Code: Select all

killall -9 AudioComponentRegistrar

Xcode crashes frequently.

Not here.

I could continue with this listing but i do not want to waste more even more time as a developer

Sure.

Nice post! All power to you and your company.

[Etienne1973]

Geekbench Processor Charts 2020-11-12



MacBook Air (M1, 2020) is up on par with AMD Ryzen 9 5950X raw CPU processing Single-Core.



MacBook Air 8-core (M1, 2020) is only 4x slower than AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990x 64-core.

[Jim Rosebrook]

Curious to see what how the M1 will measure with the newly revised Cinebench R23...

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/new-c ... w-m1-chips

[Sascha Franck]

The new Macs are a great move for Apple and the shareholders, but not a nice one for the customers and developers

Well, in case a Macbook Air is able to deliver roughly the same performance as my cheesegrater (after looking at some Geekbench scores, it does look like, but I'm waiting for the new Cincebench tests...), that *is* a great move for customers, no way around it.

And yes, I agree that killing backwards compatibility (often for no reason at all) is pretty bad practice on Apples part, but in this case, should the new CPUs deliver that much better performance, it is justified to start sort of from scratch. Every bit as justified as the move from PPC to Intel back then.

[Sascha Franck]

Which old Mac Pro you have?

2x2.66 12-core 5.1 (2010).

That's still quite good machine.

But you can't run macOS Catalina or later on it AFAIK. That's the problem sooner or later I guess.

Well, I could, but that'd require a hack - a minimal one, but still a hack. Not much of a problem, though, so far I'm still on High Sierra, need to finally get me a metal compatible GPU in the next weeks so I can at least update to Mojave and the latest Logic. I don't have any plans to go further than that because even just going to Catalina would cause me headaches in terms of losing some things. No big headaches but still. So I think once I went to Mojave, I'll freeze the status of that machine and keep using it until it breaks - as, say, a rehearsal room recording machine, which it will do just fine for another decade to come.

For my own musings I'd however like to be more or less up to date and a certain part of me wants a mobile computer (that old 2008 plastic Macbook is *really* showing its age, Snow Leopard as well). So in case I get roughly the same overall performance of my MP (which I never really need) and better singlecore performance (which I would like a lot, being a guitarist sort of depending on lowest possible latencies once I use plugin amp sims) from a 13" MBP (or heck, even a Macbook Air), that'd be quite amazing. Hence I'm very interested in any kind of benchmarks, especially reallife ones under constant load.
Fortunately (well, sort of, kinda... or not, argh...) all this will have to wait until the dreaded C19 thing is at least partially defeated. As long as I'm just sitting at home and doing random jobs here and there, I certainly don't need a new computer, let alone a mobile one. And let alone money is an object these days.

[Sascha Franck]

If you are doing professional work with a Mac I would better leave that patching.

Did you have bad experience or something with it?

Some colleagues are still using their Pro's without issues with this hack, I heard from them about this, they upgraded their Pro's to the fullest and they make a great living working on them, running latest Logic and all that, so dunno, seems like it's working for them just fine.

Catalina will run fine on 5.1 Mac Pros (I know of some people doing just that), but so far I can't see any reason to update. In case there was a Logic update requiring Catalina (10.6 perhaps will), this might look different, but until that point I rather enjoy being able to keep using all those goodies I collected over the years.

[Markus Krause]

Apple does not fix serious problems with audio. AU validation is broken since 3 years for example.

What serious problems? I agree that AU validation doesn't always work, but it's a simple fix. Either restart or run

Code: Select all

killall -9 AudioComponentRegistrar

Seriously? you should run killall -9? =))))
Isn't it regular issue with Apple? I work in different business but I saw three months long email exchange about bug in Safari that in the end we found work around.

It is a well-known and serious technical problem with Audiounits which appeared with OSX 10.9.
Audiounits are not longer detected after an installation. The user has to reboot the Mac first.

Code: Select all

killall -9 AudioComponentRegistrar

...is a dirty hack which fixes a technical problem with Apple's AU validation (auval).
This script must be added to the installers for the AudioUnits.
The problem is known since many years and has not been fixed by Apple.

I also remember the drama with 'notarisation'. A massive number of developers had serious problems with it. There is a long thread about it on the developer-forum on kvr.

I remember the drama when big-endian and little-endian was changed with the Intel Macs. Big parts of the software had to be rewritten.

Carbon was kicked. No 64 bit support for it. All GUI code had to be rewritten to Cocoa. Cocoa can only be programmed with 'Objective C'. An exotic programming language really different from C++.

[tq]

The first independent benchmarks look mighty impressive. If a MacBook Air without fans can outperform my 2016 MacBook Pro, I know what I am buying next...