M1 Rant

spurn

I'm sure this thread will be closed quickly, but I have to vent about the completely inexcusable lack of M1 compatibility with NI products. I'm a professional Film/TV composer, highly invested in the NI platform (which I think is great, obviously), and it is LUDICROUS that there is no compatibility with Apple Silicon almost TWO YEARS after its release, when EVERY other software I use is now M1 compatible. I recently purchased an M1 Pro laptop and an Apple Studio with M1 Ultra, but running NI stuff through Logic on Rosetta is a crash/bug fest and obviates the entire reason for buying Apple's new, faster machines. I know that NI has been teetering at the point of bankruptcy for a while now, and it's not surprising given their total inability to keep up with the changes in Apple hardware. It's a shame, because as we all know, they make so many great products, but I am systematically switching to other companies' software give NI's total inability to keep up.

Kubrak

If it does not work under Rosetta 2, blame Apple, not NI. It is Apple fault that their SW does not work as advertised....

Beside that, Kontakt is AS native for few months... That is what professionals use the most....

If you move to platform, that is not supported by SW you use, it is your fault, not the fault of SW provider, that it does not work instantly.

NI is slower than others, but two, three years is just normal for adoption of new platform. It looks like NI AS native compatibility will come in 2-3 months.... And it is not that far behind iZotope, for example...

Maciej Repetowski

iZotope presented detailed roadmap and announced which plugins will not be made M1 native. They do respect their customers and don't keep them guessing.

Unlike NI, where we don't know what and when will be made native. "Most products within next 2-3 months", extremely precise...

Dear Kubrak, you are my inspiration - I think I'm am going to start posting in EVERY single thread about PC/Windows problems and blame EVERYTHING on Microsoft. 🤣

I don't even have a PC computer, but who cares...

Kubrak

OK, Kontakt is AS native. The rest runs under Rosetta 2. If it does not run well, or not at all, it is bad coding on Apple side. Full dot.

Apple users are crying on the wrong grave.

NI does not give roadmaps on anything, why should they do it on AS? Their plugins work, or should work under Rosetta. If it works, just fine. Use it and peacefully wait. If it does not run, ask Apple to fix Rosetta. It is rensponsibility of Apple to provide functional system.

----

No, problem if you comment Win problems. I do not see many Win users crying that NI should do something for Win version of NI plugins.... Win maintains compatibility quite well. Old programs mostly work on newer OS versions, sometimes happens that new programs do not work on very old OS versions. At least not officially.

JesterMgee

I run both mac and PC and have to deal with and support both and It's pretty well known (or if you are not aware you may step into the light now) that the speed at which NI develops anything outside sample packs nowadays is increasingly slow. For the 7 years I have been kicking the $h!t around here it's been steadily getting worse. Suport and engagement on these forums has been way better, but any actual word on what is happening behind the scenes and releases have been disappointingly vacant!

There has been promises over the years and very vague attempts to keep us more updated but that usually fizzles out and back to the old "It's on our roadmap" which seems to be a piece of blank paper with a line connecting A to B and a question mark?

I have little faith that anything I have ever hoped to see as a feature will be included, I am pretty sure NI have exited the software market to just be distributors of content now and just haven't told us.

However I also don't hold NI accountable over every change that Apple make to their OS or architecture. Maybe M1 has been "out" for 2 years but it has only been in actual (active or wider use) circulation for 1 year and basically there is a huge amount of rewriting and testing not to mention just between OS updates things like even just graphical elements can break. macOS is honestly a pig to continue to support because the developer doesn't care a fig about compatibility, they do what THEY want and if you want to work on their platform you MUST keep pace.

What perpetuates this mentality is users who cry foul and blame every other manufacturer for not keeping pace then the finger can be pointed down the line at "NI who aren't bothering". There is already progress happening, some things are M1 and some things are in the pipe BUT also consider M1 and macOS is not the only thing they have to work on or care about.

So if you are a "professional" you will do what we all do BEFORE updating into new systems and investigate what does and does not work before updating/switching/investing in something new. I would never invest in any new platform without first checking all my core "heavily invested" choices are also compatible. Maybe you had no choice but first you should have checked. Not everything "just works" with Apple these days, it's actually quite a mess where compatibility comes into play.

JesterMgee

Dear Kubrak, you are my inspiration - I think I'm am going to start posting in EVERY single thread about PC/Windows problems and blame EVERYTHING on Microsoft. 🤣

Problem is these days there are seldom any real problems being reported tho :)

The "apple cart" has honestly lost some wheels over the years and i've used both platforms since it was called a Macintosh and compared to Windows 3.1 so it's been a while... Easily 90% of support related questions are due to incompatibility or problems after any new OS update, especially now around the finicky security preference setup macOS introduced in 10.13

An audio field I work in that has software used in large industries such as Film, Movies and Gaming where I support a userbase of probably 65% PC users (because of the gaming side) Easily 80% of the support I give is for macOS related issues and almost 80% of that is because of OS and compatibility problems. The amount of time our programmers spend chasing and supporting new bugs and incompatibilities is easily 95% macOS related, that is a lot of lost productivity and no sooner are things reasonably stable, they update everything and it starts again :(

It's designed that way tho, it perpetuates both Apple and Developers to push people forward and in the process, force them to upgrade their software to keep pace with hardware and vise versa. In a way it is good because from a support perspective you don't have to really care much if they are on a 10 year old system, "no support for you...", just tell them sorry, you need to invest $2900 in a new system and another $3000 in software and subscription upgrades.

Kubrak

Yes, one of the aspects of Apple is also that by not providing backward compatibility they force customers to buy new Apple HW. Less troubles for Apple with maintaining backward compatibility and obsolence generated new sales. Two benefits for Apple in one shot.

I do not understand one thing. People are complaining that 10+year old controller/audiodevice does not run on M1, but they do not complain that few years old Mac does not run latest OS.... And they must buy new one, if they want to use current SW, as it also usually does not support old versions of OS, just few years back.....

PK The DJ

@JesterMgee it's normal for companies to keep "word on what is happening behind the scenes" private. Nothing unusual there.

My employers do not tell me what new products they're developing, or what their plans are for next week/month etc - and I work there! They certainly would not publish that info to their customers.

Tony Jones

We seem to have a lot of threads circling this topic, I think there are many grains of truth in most positions people are taking, and a lot of entrenched positions not listening or prepared to understand the situation is not black and white. The extent to which I think this matters (if anyone care about yet another opinion) depends on:

• Are you a Mac or PC user
• Apple's policy drives people to spend and shakes the dev market, often causing problems and making developers stay current or abandon the game, creating a lot of noise in some quarters, but not all
• NI has had a lot of success with a very wide range of products, falling into several classes (eg Kontakt based, expansions, Reaktor based, Maschine...) and each has different problems with regards technical debt. Different people on the forum care about different product sets
• NI is in an industry and many players (not all) with simpler product sets have led the way in M1 / Monterey compatibility (in my case Arturia, Waves, Tonebooster, Plugin Alliance, Spectrasonics) so this makes NI look slow if you compare to these companies
• NI has also been one of the many devs struggling with GUIs and scaling (again some have moved forward with this, but not all) and many people don't like this
• We know NI has had dev issues / changes / redundancies in recent years so are nervous
• Short-term versus long-term: some people care a lot about 'it must work today' others worry about 'if I invest today, what happens to all my tools in 5-10 years?' Outside the music industry I have worked with a lot of large UK users of IT, all heavily using Microsoft, and more than you'd imaging paying vast amounts of money to keep ancient kit running OS platforms no longer supported running apps they don't know how to port to new platforms. Yes, it's technical debt and one day it cripples you, and as a user the only way to be immune is to stay loyal to nothing, moving along project by project and damn the continued short term repeat costs of new toys.

It's not black and white, blaming people doesn't do more than annoy people with different opinions, it's not terribly constructive and I feel sorry to the NI team having to wade through all this and report views back up the chain. They must know people are disappointed already. The only way to make a difference is by not buying the products (I won't be buying big Komplete bundles in future, why would I want to own so many legacy products I won't waste time learning to use against when they stop working?)

Wouldn't it be nice to have a day when we don't post to complain? Must go, my pet unicorn just flew out the window...

Nico_NI

Hey there,

We already have a thread open for all things M1 here:

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/160/native-instruments-apple-silicon-m1-compatibility

Please join this discussion if you have comments about it so we can all participate in one place.

This thread is close.