Native Instruments Apple Silicon M1 Compatibility

700 W is the past (or Intel's present), I have 65 W AMD thing that is stronger than M1 and pretty close to M1 Pro. And silent and small. Current AMD chips have only slightly worse energy efficiency than AS. Zen4 comming in few months will bring even better energy efficiency... No need for switching to ARM on Win platform....

And concerning your question, wherher I would use API that is going to be depreciated one day, instead of the future one. That is question of money, effort, future plans. If I have codebase that uses the old one, I would probably use that. And switched to new one when really needed. And if I didnt have codebase using the old API, I would use the new one. And it also depends how much of old codebase I have.

It also may depend on third party SW. I might use library for multiplatform and it may or may not support new API.

It is costly to rewrite things, one may introduce bugs (customer´s complaints) and user does not have visible profit.... Big customers prefer not to do big changes to SW they use, if not needed. They want it runs well, and they do not care what API is used.... Often they do not want to pay for change to newer API/technology, if everything works. They prefer that it works as it is.

And yes. For many developers is Windows the main platform (more customers) and Mac secondary one. Mac is interesting, but snmaller market. And maintaining SW for Apple more costly...

Desktop market (towers) is mostly gaming and graphics workstations now. Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 needs about 400W alone. Same with hi end AMD cards in workstations and gaming computers. This is just not sustainable in the long term.

To Kubrak: I agree with all your other points in general, though. Also about AMD processors.

Apple is secondary market and that’s the reason behind NI stating it as a priority.

:smirk:

It's strange : it seems that Apple is not a secondary market for 90% of plugins devs (that already released Apple Silicon versions of their plugins)...

I think it's not honest to find technical or strategic justifications to NI. They just didn't care about updating their products since years. You can't say for exemple that VST3 users are a secondary market.

Why unbelievable? They did nothing during those 16 years. Maybe they even tried from time to time, and it did not work. So, why to bother, if everything has worked fine in VST2? Why to risk that things will go wrong, why to spend money on something 98% of users do require? Just to please Steinberg?

And they would have to support VST2 and VST3 for many years. It is reasonable and economical to switch as late as possible, not as fast as possible.

Because that's how companies get left behind. How many companies are no longer here because they could't keep up with the times. It's not rocket science, customers are fickle and if they find something new and convenient they will move, there is no loyalty. It's up to the company/developer/provider to move where the customers are going. This is like business 101.

By not providing what the customers want, when they want it they leave room for more nimble competitors to come and eat their lunch. That's why a lot of large software (like Adobe) companies are moving to subscription models, less chance customers will move elsewhere if they have to keep paying rent just open their projects.

I'm a programmer but also a co-owner of a software company and I usually do a lot of management/planning. From my point of view relying on something to be working while the technology is moving on is incredibly short-sighted. I'm totally aware of the fact that you have to plan your resources (people-power) wisely since you'll spend time and money. But if you look across the landscape you see that NI is sticking out in this "problem area" (M1 compatibility) like a sore thumb. There are other major companies who already have native M1 compatibility for all or substantial amount of their products for quite some time. Apple provided M1 development machines from summer 2020 if I'm not mistaken. That will be almost 2 years now. The company I co-own has only <10 developers but the (very small) teams built several applications during those 2 years from the ground up - this also encompasses business analysis, analysis of technical requirements, UI design, testing and deployment apart from the actual coding. These were web and mobile apps but the projects were non-trivial. I can't believe that company such as NI couldn't do better as it did with this. I don't see behind the curtain and I don't want to be judgemental (there's really no point in doing that) but to me it seems like a poor management decision or they really underestimated this. Now they're being roasted by musicians who work on Macs and want to upgrade (or already did) and use a lot of NI stuff. They look incompetent and I bet that's something they're not very much proud of and it wasn't part of their marketing plan (at least I hope so). It's pretty sad to read the comments here and I hope NI will be able to deliver the updated apps soon without burning out the developers.