Status on m1/m2 update?

nightjar

Holding NI accountable for the slow development of AS native support is totally valid.

The biggest root cause of this slowness is the "creaky old codebase" is 100% the fault of decision makers within NI.

Had NI made better decisions about modernizing this codebase years ago, then so many other things may have happened in a more timely manner.

Apple is not to blame for NI poor decision making. NI owns that 100%.

Laureano Lopez

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/26626#Comment_26626

Apple's move has nothing to do with innovation, it's just a chapter in their constant effort to lock their fandom in a parallel universe. If Microsoft support is a bunch of underpaid, overworked guys somewhere in the world desperately answering questions they know nothing about, Apple support is a proud team of guys in shirts politely indicating that there are no issues, because Apple doesn't make mistakes.

This doesn't change the fact that x86 is also an old creaky architecture, or more precisely an old creaky instruction set implemented with great effort by some amazing technology that it doesn't deserve. ARM is getting old already, and its mainstream implementations are incomplete and underperformant, but that's besides the point: x86 can't be extended forever, something will have to replace it and I'm pretty sure I'll live to see it. Apple is fast forwarding the situation to have the advantage of coming first, by semirandomly deprecating whatever they please. So we're all at an impasse, where things that were pretty standard ten years ago are now atomized into a number of incompatible alternatives. This means it's more important than ever to have your dependencies completely abstracted from your application. This was a basic tenet twenty years ago as much as now, the fact that it's become crucial is incidental.

NI's approach in the last years reminds me of these "modern" conservatives according to which all problems can be solved cutting corners, "streamlining" here and there, and putting a nice, comforting sans serif facade over the whole thing, while everything essential keeps rotting. Of course there are worse elephants out there, some of which are also struggling with AS. But take, for example, Cubase and DP: they come from the late Pleistocene, and they're AS native. Would you bet that Reaktor's codebase is larger than Cubase's?

colB

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/26641#Comment_26641

so... Apple suck, NI suck, x86 sucks, and ARM mostly sucks, cubase and DP both suck, and Reaktor sucks... man stuff really does suck 😁😜

I totally get it - a lot of stuff could be so much better than it is.

I still love Reaktor though, in spite of all the shortcomings!

Laureano Lopez

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/26645#Comment_26645

😂

Well, "sucks" is too broad a brush. More like NI is run by speculators, x86 is very old, ARM is not so old, Cubase and DP are old but good, and it's because I do like Reaktor that I hate to see it semi-abandoned.

Apple does suck though 😊

Kubrak

We will see, but I do not expect x86 to disapear any time soon. It has one, two, three decades left...

Reaktor has old codebase, because what would pay for total rewritting.... I also have 30 year old codebase in many of my programs. It works, customers are satisfied and do not want me to change it. Not speaking about that they would pay for it.... They simply do not want the change, because it works, and rewritting would mean, there could be problems. And they do not want any problems...

Kubrak

The same with Apple... Nobody is too big to fail. Today, Intel has problems, tomorrow it may be Apple....

djadidai

Lol, this thread is getting way out of hand. So much despise and negativity being thrown around without really much substance. I can’t imagine a more ignorant comment than “apple sucks”. Way to argue for something. If apple did suck why is it being used by the best of the best? Year after year? And not only in music production? There must be a reason…. Hmmm I wonder what it could be.. ah well, I’d have to ponder a whole week…

Kubrak

It has nice logo and gives "status". And I would not say Apple is used by the best of the best. For example I would not touch Apple product even by a broomstick. So, there is at least one the best who does not use Apple.

Laureano Lopez

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/26694#Comment_26694

I can't talk for anyone else, but I'm having a great week. No negativity. Just a simple recognition that Apple has a long history of horrible business practice. Even their technically good choices have more to do with that than "innovation" or anything. This is one of those cases: it's probably about time to move on from x86 (and OpenGL) to fresher lands, but they're doing it in a way that deliberately breaks the market, evading any kind of industry consensus before it can even start. I can see the advantages their products have for many people's workflow, but Apple's stuff is great while it works. When it doesn't, it's not even that you're on your own: most likely there's nothing you can do about it.

(I even linked a clear example of that: screen drawing has been broken since 2018, and everyone has had to roll their own rect invalidation layer because, according to Apple, "the new behavior should be considered the correct behavior, and getRectsBeingDrawn:count: can no longer be relied upon", so "developers who need drawing optimization" have to "roll their own system".)

Maciej Repetowski

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/26697#Comment_26697

Of course you wouldn’t. You’re PC user.

Apple is not for people who like to build PC from parts and to upgrade their computers later. Apple also doesn’t make cheap computers for the masses. It is expensive and people need to plan what they need (Ram, SSD size) before purchase.

Apple is for people who like “computer as an appliance” paradigm. Not for tinkerers, which is like 99% of individual PC users - for them, the concept of turn-key computer is alien.

So I understand the resentment, because I don’t like PCs at all. But I do not understand hatred, name calling and rudeness (not from you Kubrak, from others).

nightjar

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/26711#Comment_26711

Your expectation that Apple should adhere to industry consensus is rather odd. Apple choosing to decrease its dependence on other elements of the market seems smart to me. And I suspect much of the current macOS coding issues also relates to a strategic long-term vision regarding optimization of shared development for macOS/iOS/iPadOS.

Breaking some eggs to make an omelette is OK by me.

Maciej Repetowski

Apple is in position to make their own standards. One can choose not to program for their platform and not to sell software for their platform. Simple as that.

Laureano Lopez

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/26717#Comment_26717

It's not an expectation, it's a value judgment. It may be all great for Apple stockholders, but I'm not an Apple stockholder, nor I identify as one. It's just bad for the world. It's not that terrible with processors, because Arm (the company) retains some independence, and the architecture is widely used, so if you had been abstracting your dependencies the shift shouldn't be that hard. For example, I only had to write a header redefining my vectorization primitives -if I had been sparkling my code with _mm intrinsics, it would be much worse. That's what I meant: Apple may suck, but something seems to be really off with NI's codebase. If you can't implement a simple zoom in fixed steps for your UI after two decades, there must be some serious hardcoding involved. (Yes, the optimizing compiler, I know. Still.) Users should know, though, that even if the simpler, more orthogonal arch can make some code faster, it can also make other code slower: particularly anything that used AVX, as AS doesn't implement SVE, so it doesn't have 256-bit vectors. Now, if we're talking innovation by itself, going ARM is already a conservative, subpar choice: why not RISC-V? Well, it's an open standard, and Apple hates open standards. That's very clear in the move from OpenGL to Metal. It's a good thing that the Khronos Group exists, but of course Apple had to go its own way, so now everyone has to duplicate their rendering code, or rely on additional abstraction layers like Skia. This is bad for everyone, in and out of the Apple bubble, and it's a consistent pattern: same happens with connectors, communication protocols... There's no gain for users here, only for Apple's stockholders.

nightjar

I strongly disagree with your opinion that there is no gain for users.

Apple's approach allows them to uniquely pursue their vision of overall user experience.

I as a user prefer this less fettered approach in creating a unified ecosystem for my extended senses and second brain.

Laureano Lopez

I can perfectly understand that, but under the hood, when these choices make software worse overall, or they complicate or plain rule out some use cases, that's bad for you too as a Mac user. It may very well not be relevant compared to the advantages you get, but it's also perfectly avoidable by Apple, and their motivations there have nothing to do with you, me or anyone else than themselves.