M1 Rant

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...

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.

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.....

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...