Status on m1/m2 update?

I don't disagree with any of this, I just think it was not so much inevitable as an accumulation of management choices that have actually been questioned by users for years without the company doing much of it. If Max can be sustainable for Cycling after 37 years, how come that Reaktor can't? Well, Max was never left rotting and has constantly been very much alive. Yes, it's pretty much their only product, but that doesn't make it less niche. What's "the mainstream" nowadays anyway? How is it smart to focus on things that everyone does, maybe better than you?

I think the rotting started when Schmitt left. It was his product, in more than one sense. It may happen that lurking behind different naming conventions and conflicting usage of patterns and a fair amount of obfuscated duplication, there are dark corners where there's still code from v3 with hardcoded SSE calls and the like. This happens when a pet project grows into a flagship product of a fairly sized company, and sometimes it does require rewrites, like when MS merged NT into Windows or Steinberg merged Nuendo into Cubase. In a sense, Core may have allowed to dodge this: I can imagine Sync Modular being more consistent, so they only had to solve an interface to have the "clean" stuff quarantined. That's of course a huge band-aid, and still there it is. Without Schmitt, tackling the dirty stuff may require a CSI investigation that no investor is willing to back up. It's likely that no one at the decision-making levels has a vision for Reaktor, and it's become the prototyping tool that they still sell as-is, for the pennies it may yield.

I think Max is different partly because they managed to corner academia. In Universities, at least where I live, Max is well known, but I talked to a couple of lecturers who were teaching multi-media degree modules, and using Max, they didn't even know what Reaktor was, that was maybe 9 years ago...

That sounds plausible. It did seem like he wanted to start again and make a new Reaktor from the ground up. IIRC, they started something like that, but then nothing came of it, at least publicly.

Sometimes I wonder if this is the only reason Reaktor still exists. It can be used to differentiate NI from their competitors. It's a 'serious' tool that can be presented as something to aspire to. Like buying a book that's too advanced and just sits on the shelf, but you feel good about having that book... and maybe one day you will be able to understand past chapter 1.

So NI don't want to spend resources on Reaktor because there not a huge return on that investment vs doing the minimum. But they benefit from keeping it alive, and would potentially lose a lot from it's demise. The result is the current situation. It's been 'ticking over' for a long time.

I'm not sure that any of this is particularly relevant to the topic at hand though. Reaktor is what it is, and has been for many years. For folk to start publicly attacking NI because they don't have a huge team ready and waiting to immediately roll out partial rewrite of the compiler engine in response to an out of the blue platform swap by apple is... breathe... ridiculous, but unfortunately exactly what I would expect from some minority of Apple users. For them Apple can do no wrong, and so any problems must be blamed on other parties. Narratives are manufactured to support this process. And so it goes.

Apple did it right. It is impossible to predict in real time what x86 code Reaktor's compiler will generate and translate it at the same time without huge delay. My guess is that Reaktor will not be made native M1 app because of that - they would have to rewrite the internal compiler completely, which might be financially not viable.

I'm not "attacking" NI, but have it your way ;)

And yes, Apple made better translator from x86 to ARM than Microsoft, the truth sometimes hurts :)

I mean... I like using Windows because it doesn't dictate me stuff - unlike Apple, who (apparently) thinks their customers are too airheaded to handle a computer right, hence they feel the need to put them on a leash (e.g. Catalina and its security changes). One would think that having common sense (e.g. not clicking on every link in an email, not downloading weird stuff, etc...) should be enough... in 2019 and beyond.

Does it make me a "fan" of Windows? In the end, it all boils down to personal preference. What works best for oneself.

I guess there is not a single person in the World that would love MS. Beside Gates and few other fellows....

But still, MS is way better than Apple.

I hope Reaktor gets AS support and not becomes legacy product pr almost an alternative supplied by Soundwide is set in place at the right moment.

But if not… what will be your position guys?

What I wanted to point out is, there are almost no people that like/love MS, while there is quite lots of people who love Apple.... IMHO it says a lot about those companies and their userbase...

And concerning Reaktor... I will use it at least 10-15 years even if NI makes it legacy. But I doubt it will happen.