Ten years ago there was simply no question in my mind that apple hardware + OS X was the right choice for audio/music production (not to mention a relatively hassle free Unix workstation for developers + some desktop software usage). Twenty years ago? Still Apple.
Over the last 3-4 years, however, I've come to the conclusion that my next purchase needs to be something else if for no other reason than to clearly understand the alternatives.
This is key:
> The bad news: Apple still can’t seem to keep third parties synced up with its now annual release cadence. In a now yearly ritual, Apple has broken plug-in validation for its own Audio Unit format. Open question: why? Why is this now a regular feature of updating an operating system for a format that has basically remained unchanged for years? Why shouldn’t desktop upgrades be the kind of no-brainer mobile upgrades are.
I have a hard time avoiding at least one of two conclusions:
(a) Apple either now lacks the necessary talent to do the quality of work they sustained with OS X for a while
(b) they fundamentally simply do not care at an institutional level
(And if it were really only about Audio Units, that'd be one thing. But it's not.)
I also have a feeling it's a hardware/software combination. All the post-Haswell Macbooks (from 2013 onwards) seem to fare much, much worse for audio applications than the ones produced prior to the switch.
I recently got rid of a late 2013 Retina MBP in favour of a late 2012 15" RMBP, and the difference in audio performance is astounding. No dropouts anymore, all my plugins work again, and Ableton is once again usable. I was hoping for a difference in performance but I was amazed at how much better the older one performed, with identical memory and SSD disk.
And that's not the only issue I had with the 13" Haswell RMBP. Often it would lose its entire USB chain (which includes the built-in trackpad and keyboard!) which would require me to remote into it to shut it down. Thunderbolt wasn't much better, with frequent network dropouts over a gigabit tb adapter. The poor thing barely worked out of the box and it didn't get much better.
I don't know what happened specifically with Haswell, but it seems like Apple and Intel haven't really been working to ensure it's a stable platform.
A thinner phone with less holes in it is more important than a working phone with a headphone jack. It makes me believe Apple is run more by designers than engineers.
Apple's relationship with pro-anything is collapsing.
I write Mac software for a YC company in the pro video space. Our new product started deployments a couple of months back, and a major source of problems has been the Apple platform -- both hardware and software. It's so bad that we're actively working to move off the Mac completely. (I've spent 15 years doing Mac software, so this is a big deal for me.)
Apple doesn't have pro hardware anymore. The 2013 Mac Pro is a complete failure, maybe the worst computer they've ever made. We deployed a dozen Mac Pros, and four of them suffer from a GPU overheating problem that's widespread but little talked about -- Apple has been replacing Mac Pros quietly for years.
The original Mac Pro was a great computer for the pro market: lots of extensibility, high-quality cooling system. The new Mac Pro removed all that and offers no benefit to users like us. It's really more like a cylindrical rebirth of the infamous Power Mac G4 Cube.
The same heat problems apply to their laptops. Many MBP models with NVIDIA graphics end up needing yearly motherboard replacements, which Apple is providing through a special replacement program. (My previous MacBook Pro has had this done three times.) Apple's drive towards ever-thinner and ideally fanless computers like the 12" MacBook suggests that this trend isn't going to change. I'm afraid the next MacBook Pro will be the "worst of both worlds", a combination of traits from the 12" MacBook and the Mac Pro.
Meanwhile on the software front, macOS has become an unstable and unpredictable platform for high-performance media applications. The emphasis on power saving, sandboxing and relentlessly throttling down userspace applications has made it quite hard to ensure that all our processes keep ticking along as they should. Working around macOS features designed for fanless laptops is such a waste of time when our deployment environment would ideally be a rackmount old-style Mac Pro.
Looks like there's going to be lots of Windows 10 in my future :(
I owned my own studio and do video production from time to time still to this day (Video People your audio SUCKS learn how to use the RIGHT microphone and learn the term ON AXIS, rant over)
In the 90s as I was buying I actually was going to go with BeOS and had a Tascam DX2424 external hard drive recorder (Thing was awesome). Steinberg, as I was a week away from buying my first Apple computer, pulled the plug on BeOS applications. I went Windows NT Nuendo 1.0. 80% of the studios my size were all ProTools. I HATED ProTools and their hardware lock in.
After a while I kind of got a niche going and I would also work at mixing or engineering things at Apple based studios about once a month. I have always had the unfortunate luck of making every single Mac crash while I use them. I would speak about my frustration and the "Mac Guy" would shake his head and say I don't know as I would have to redo hours of work.
Later on in Video. I would be on Premier or Final Cut Pro and the same thing would happen where I was in the middle of hours long sessions and I would get some crash that wouldn't lose me work anymore but it got me out of "The Zone." If you ever did major video editing you know what that feels like. The Apple "crash" was different because sometime it would take a while to realize that while I have the video gui up what I was doing wasn't actually changing anything, or I couldn't grab a clip from a folder and import it OR the codex just isn't working so I can't see a preview and I would have to reboot.
I hate Apple software like Final Cut Pro because they use their own vocabulary. It was always not the standard vocabulary of the industry pre-digital nor what the other video/audio world was using.
Software Synths (Windows/Linux) seem to just work for me these days. My buddies swear with their Macs they can do the same things and then boom back to sampled sythns after a month or so due to "little issues" but they would never blame their machines or OS. I have noticed a ton more Windows in music performance the past year or two, but I really think that Linux could make a niche in live audio production a reality if the Native Instruments would provide a Linux port.
Non-Apple world is pretty ripe for Apple to lose massive market share like they are seeing the last 3 years in video.
> Many MBP models with NVIDIA graphics end up needing yearly motherboard replacements, which Apple is providing through a special replacement program. (My previous MacBook Pro has had this done three times.)
I can confirm anecdotally that this occurred with a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010). Despite claims that Apple hardware is reliable and holds its value, I'll never buy one of their personal computers again.
As somebody who worked almost exclusively in Windows (with varying results for many years), predominately in semi-pro level audio work, I'm curious what you think about the capabilities of the Surface platform vs. the current Mac approach. I'm thinking an external video card would be a huge plus, if possible, but from what I've seen performance wise, I'm looking to transition to a Surface Pro in the future from an otherwise perfectly satisfactory Lenovo. Granted this is for audio but a lot of great audio equipment is USB 3 and workable in offloading a lot of the power needs (and external storage for large files). If video could eventually be served well by the same approach (modular?) that'd be interesting.
I have a 2008 Mac Pro that is still incredibly reliable, but I am starting to feel the need for a new computer for music production. And it doesn't look like they will even support the 2008 Pros with the next OS release.
I miss Snow Leopard -- Logic on Snow Leopard was an incredibly solid platform for music production!
I'm contemplating whether it might be possible to do all my music work on Mac Minis. I really like having four hard drives and a tower case...
>Many MBP models with NVIDIA graphics end up needing yearly motherboard replacements
Yearly? I know multiple people who need to get their 2011 MacBook Pro motherboard replaced on a monthly basis. One managed to make Apple give in and swap it for an equivalent 2015 model, and the others are still trying…
This, and it's incredibly depressing not merely in its result but in its sheer needlessness. Sometimes even the best companies make choices that really don't fit someone's use case, maybe to the extent of ending the relationship, but it's possible to step back and see the business case for it. It's not happy but it can be logical. But I always feel a special set of negative feelings when a company I like well enough does something bad and it's just doesn't even make any sense period. In this case while yes the old Mac Pro case could have used some minor refreshing to make better default use of space in a world of 2.5" drives and such, frankly I suspect most of us would have been reasonably content if Apple took the absolutely utterly laziest, cheapest possible approach, kept the exact same thing and merely kept updating the chipset and CPU and graphics card and that's it. SB-E, IB-E, etc., the same old dual socket boring workstation, just with the internals refreshed. Maybe swap the ports for USB-C eventually. They could have kept a higher profit margin, done much less engineering work, and had a better product.
Instead they actively expended money making it fundamentally worse, and not just that but making it a zero-sum game. Many people correctly compared the Cylinder (it's hard to resist the more colloquial in our office "trashcan mac") MP to the old Cube in terms of basic thermal and design tradeoffs, but the Cube never inspire active dislike because there was still the MP. On the contrary the small niche of users that actually found its set of tradeoffs worth it had a soft spot for a long time. Nobody lost anything at all from the existence of the Cube, so the only people who got were those fine with it, and anyone else could just look from afar. By making the neoCube the only thing though Apple shot any hope of that.
And the Cylinder was form over function in a way I can't recall from Apple in a very long time, and also seemed a fundamental misreading of what they're good at and what they want to be actively engaged in. The mirror of an easily expandable pro friendly system offering flexibility on user side is that it also provides flexibility on the manufacturer side: because 3rd parties can do more entirely on their own, the manufacturer in turn can get away with doing less because the gaps can be filled in by the market. The more control a manufacturer takes for themselves, the more responsibility falls on their shoulders in turn, which is why command-and-control economics tends to have scalability problems vs approaches that make more use of markets.
At any rate it's a real bummer. I've looked at Xeon hackintosh efforts but that's definitely getting into pretty shaky territory and with Apple abandoning pro systems themselves support is probably only going to get worse. I agree it is time, probably past time, to start planning to abandon the platform but boy will it be painful (closer to 25 years in my case).
I don't get how any professional can trust Apple after the past few years. If as a pro, you aren't at the very least actively looking for alternatives to Apple products you are doing your future self a huge disservice.
After using nothing but Apple products for a decade, I am being forced to wean myself off them, because I cannot depend on Apple for the tools of my trade. What they've done with their Pro hardware is ridiculous. Even if they release the greatest computers ever released for Pros in a month, their history over the past few years makes them completely unreliable.
Final Cut Pro, Aperture, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, Mac Pro, XServe, OSX Server, form, in one way or another at least a majority of their pro offerings, for any useful definition of the word Pro, and Apple's behavior with these products have ranged from dumbing down, to neglect, to straight up abandonment.
And it's not just pro users, but also "prosumers". iPhoto, Mail, Calendar, iWork all been dumbed down to the point of not being able to serve any prosumer needs.
Apple provides experience and value to consumers that seems far beyond their competitors but their actions towards pro users couldn't have been more clear in their intent. Lip service with an occasional teaser to keep you hooked.
Apple needs to be very careful, by effectively abandoning the pro creatives market, their products start to look more and more like expensive toys and convenience products. Supporting pro-level consumers, they made their offerings indispensable at work and thus more convenient for users at home.
I do not believe that Apple has ever offered the "greatest computers ever released for Pros". For example, the MacBook Pro is more Prosumer than Pro when compared to a Lenovo Thinkpad P70 with a 17" 4K display, Xeon CPU and 64GB of RAM.
EDIT: designed for heavy sustained CPU applications
I was a heavy Logic 9 user. I've been into producing for 18 years or so now, since I was a kid, a die-hard Mac user. I've been through Digital Performer, Cubase and Logic Pro. Apple was holding it down with the pro software after they bought Emagic. It's kinda sad to see that the situation has deteriorated to this level.
Well, I started getting fed up with Apple ~6 years ago now.
After my hard drive crashed, I moved to to producing on exclusively on Linux as a personal, mental and spiritual challenge. This was very difficult in 2011. As much as I wanted Ardour to be what I wanted it to be, the only thing that was stable enough to get stuff done on was QTractor...
Since then, Linux has gotten waayyyy better for music production. KXStudio is excellent. (don't waste time on Ubuntu Studio, it's not configured well). There are plenty of amazing LV2 and LADSPA plugins, and even some good VST plugins like TAL NoizeMaker. Ardour is great if you're lucky to get a stable build. As far as "mainstream pro" music production on linux... it's maybe not quite there yet for a general audience, but if you're a producer/composer/independent artist with some technical patience, Linux audio production is completely amazing. It's a whole different paradigm with plenty of room for professionals. The fact that Jack is totally modular from the get-go is extremely powerful. It means that stuff can be combined in all kinds of ways. (check this thing out if you haven't already: http://moddevices.com/ )
And honestly, Bitwig has completely switched up the whole situation. Right now I'm running Bitwig on Arch and it's beastly. The only thing I miss from Logic are those excellent MIDI editing tools, non-destructive quantize. I'm also missing my favorite LV2 plugins (ZynAddSubFX). But Bitwig has plenty of synths and a fully modular system for creating endless sounds, so I'm set.
Don't need or want Apple at this point. I'm good :)
I'm an amateur in sound and music and only do occasional audio mixing and mastering on a basic level, and only if I need to, for video. Friend introduced me to Reaper and I've been blown away as it was easy (reportedly some people have issues with that, hah!) to use, cheap, and quite nice. Do you know if it will come to Linux as well? I know they've announced something about that.
Has Ardour come on much? I tried using it for years and years, tried Muse, Rosegarden etc. but switching to Logic Pro X suddenly meant I could get stuff done instead of faffing around. JACK is truly great on Linux and I sponsored Ardour for a while, but last time I used it a few years ago, it was lagging feature-wise.
As an amateur music dabbler, that's great to hear. I tried Linux in 2011 or so (Ardour maybe?) and gave up, got a Macbook and Logic Pro. But the idea of moving back to Linux full-time on more powerful and repairable hardware is very appealing.
For whatever reason, Apple seems to be struggling across the board when it comes to software engineering. They are slow to execute new features and when they do they are often buggy. With each release cycle they fall farther and farther behind their competition. I'm having a hard time thinking of any Apple applications that are better than their competition. I don't know if they're having trouble attracting top talent or if there's something off in their culture but they need to fix it. Swift is a good foundation to build on but it won't be enough on its own.
They're lucky Microsoft has been asleep at the wheel for the last few years or actively shooting itself in the foot (Windows 8). But MS seems to be getting its act together lately.
The answer is pretty simple: Apple is a hardware company. As much as they'd like to claim otherwise, their software is simply there to support hardware sales.
Microsoft had an identity crisis for a number of years where they weren't quite sure where they should go, but their move back to being a platform (with regards to Azure) and making sure that the rest of their lines support that work is starting to pay off. Of course, they do need to tighten things up, especially around Windows... That division in particular seems to be trying to move too quickly and it's showing.
Yep. I've been increasingly disappointed in Apple's OS X releases. Not even considering this upgrade for a point release, at least. And they're doing a very good job of promoting third party replacements for their own apps...
For a while, I thought they were chasing IOS marketshare hard, and would come back to fixing the desktop. But I'm beginning to wonder if that isn't the intent; I'm sure the 30k-foot-view financials says OS X is now the second-class product.
The problem is that OS X is the generative platform. Writers and programmers and musicians and designers and artists use Macs to produce. And a lot of these folks (me included) are getting restless.
I'll be fine - honestly, I only own one OS X box today, and my main personal desktop is Linux. I'd be annoyed for a while if I had to switch to a Linux laptop, but vim is portable, and if they continue to baby-proof the OS at the expense of automation and traditional Unix tools, it will be less annoying that staying put.
If the plan is to bring iOS to the point where, say, Ableton and Pro Tools runs sufficiently well there, then they better get on that before the OS where those tools do run rots out from under them. And if that isn't the plan, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be very curious to know what it is.
I think the simpler answer is that Apple stopped caring about "pro" apps/users quite a while ago and that it is unlikely to start again in the near future. Video people have moved to Adobe Premier on Windows; photography people have ditched the depreciated Aperture for Lightroom (maybe supplemented with Dark Table); and now music people will have their turn.
The problem is that OS X is the generative platform
If your "only iOS matters" hypothesis is correct than Apple only cares about generative OSX for generating iOS apps. That means keeping XCode working at all costs, and they can safely ignore every other use. I suspect that they understand that apart from students using Pages to write papers, MS and Google own the office productivity space.
The only remaining code to write are highly proprietary front-ends and the occasional mega-backend.
I write this from a Surface Pro, leaving a retina macboook and an ipad pro in my bag: really glad to hear someone in a core Apple industry putting together a solid case for "Apple: please vector some engineering talent to macOS, now".
The masses follow the makers. The makers are dissatisfied. Pay attention.
I feel like this article is FUD. Nearly every professional audio interface for Mac, iPhone, or iPad has a 1/4" stereo headphone output for real studio monitor headphones. No pro is concerned that they lost the 1/8" output for bargain headphones on their iPhone.
Any iMac or MacBook Pro from the last 5 years is sufficient for any pro audio workflow. A Mac Pro is still sufficient and is way overkill. A lot of people can be pretty productive on an iPad too. New Macs are coming, Apple isn't abandoning the Mac.
I just updated to macOS Sierra and all my pro audio equipment has either kept working as is or the manufacturer released a driver update within days of the macOS Sierra release.
If the article were just about the headphone jack, maybe you'd have a point. Maybe not, though. For one thing "pro audio workflow" isn't the limits of concern here. 1/4" mono ain't exactly a dream interface from an audio engineering POV (ground? what ground?), but it's sure a popular one and a lot of musicians don't know/care. If iOS devices are now instruments, just because producers/sound guys might spend hundreds on their headphones (and I have) doesn't mean there aren't going to be would-be performers using what came with the device. Or that there shouldn't be.
But the article is not just about the headphone jack, there's an additional half-dozen considerations that you haven't said anything to address other than "works for me." I can assure you that this is not everyone's experience.
> Any iMac or MacBook Pro from the last 5 years is sufficient for any pro audio workflow.
Just a few days ago, Pro Tools popped up the annoying "A CPU Overload Has Occurred" dialog box while I was working on a mix. Mid-2015 rMBP, 2.5 GHz.
It was a pretty simple session, too - nothing that breaks any rules, like reverbs on inserts. 12 or so tracks and three stereo effects (on their own busses).
I'm amazed every day at how much capability my MBP puts into my hands, but it is not without limitations. To say it's sufficient for any pro audio workflow is a bit of a stretch.
The state of Apple may be okay for you personally, but the rest of the Pro market is famously neurotic about maximum power and maximum stability. A video editing shop isn't content with rendering on three year old hardware, or having frequent updates and bugs to mess with their workflow. The article's not just sewing FUD.
I'm one of the commenters on the original thread, and I'm surprised that people here aren't discussing the other elephant in the room : pro audio software developers being exceptionally reluctant to take advantage of Apple's Developer Preview program, much more so than your average dev.
My original comment below :
"...this reveals a deeper, more cultural problem at Apple. The inability to ship OS builds to developers in time for them to adapt..."
I'm a developer and sorry but... no. The first developer preview of Sierra has been available since June 13th. That's 3 full months, and indeed you must have noticed most developers of non-audio apps have spent the summer shipping updates.
Yet somehow in the audio world, all hell breaks loose come September each year, it seems plug-in developers only start looking at the new OS the same day as their customers, and they scramble to make panicked "DO NOT UPGRADE YET !" statements. Not being ready on day 1 is unfortunate, not having started working on it is simply unprofessional, sorry.
But the worst part is that they manage to get away with it, because most of their customers (musicians are notoriously conservative with their computers) nod in approval and go "yeah yeah don't worry, I'm still on MacOS-from-8-years-ago anyway. F* Apple always breaking stuff" (just look at the forums if you don't believe me)
It simply doesn't have to be this way in most cases, and this is the real issue you should be talking about IMHO.
Well, if they would provide an easy way to run a virtualized MacOS, something what Microsoft does with their vagrant machines (Windows with different Internet Explorer versions) would go a long way.
Hardware and software both suffer, and both seem to come from a sense of “well we’re just gonna do it this way now, having put no thought into it at all, and you have to deal with it”.
For instance, there was absolutely zero reason to release an “update” to GarageBand that outright removed a substantial number of features and destroyed backward-compatibility (I don’t think I had a single song that even SOUNDED THE SAME after opening it in the “improved” version; many settings were just thrown out, or hard to find because they were just moved for no good reason). This is just plain stupid management: inept decision-making that shows a complete lack of respect for the financial and time investments made by previous customers.
And hardware decisions have felt the same. Not only was the Mac Pro not what Pros really needed but even the damn web site for the thing made it impossible to really understand what the machine could actually do. I didn’t want to sit through animations and fancy scrolling just to find a data sheet. You have to have end-to-end, seamless understanding of what you’re trying to do in an endeavor, and this is clueless behavior.
And one last factor makes me wonder: when Apple does so well in the stock market, what does that do to employees? It probably doesn’t take a lot of massive profit from stocks to make people reconsider their jobs; I figure there have to be a few new millionaires who just decided to leave, causing perhaps entirely new teams to take over some projects.
Software updates in general are just getting sloppy, this isn't limited to Apple. The Windows 10 anniversary update had issues as well. Makes me long for the old MS service pack model.
I'm a loyal Logic user (10 years) and a "pro" musician. I started getting worried when Pro X came out. The weird prosumer approach, their poor attempts at beating NI at synths, it all had me worried. Logic used to be fairly bare-bones by comparison but I never had to deal with the kind of bullshit Pro X has thrown at me: whole projects developing strange audio glitches for no apparent reason, constant missing audio files (even on newer tracks), meaningless warnings, system overloads on simple tracks, crashes, you name it. Maybe I was less bitchy when I was 20, but damn, it seems that things have gone downhill.
That doesn't even start on the hardware: $1200 for a computer with sub-optimal hardware pains the engineer in me, especially when the thing breaks every couple of years and has to go to the sandboxed repair store to get fixed.
Like many others in this thread, I leaving for Linux next time and I guess I'll make due with whatever they have.
This is absolutely a sad news and points towards the sad state of Mac for pro users. The investment on Apple desktop hardware is super expensive and often we end up with under powered hardware but macOS works well. These are for a regular user but pro users wants more. I recollect Oculus comment on why they stay away from Mac. There are lot of consolidations happens to make the devices seamlessly getting connected but unlike iOS walled ecosystem, Mac has a large third party developers heavily invested on the platform. They're sadly left here without anything!
Sorry to hear about your problems, but it was inevitable.
Back in 1997 I commented on the AOL Apple Forum that Apple should dump the creative community in favor of the larger consumer market. At the time the creative market represented about 1.5% of total computer usage. Mac market share was 2%, but only in the US. Everywhere else it was non-existent.
Not that I had anything to do with it (I didn't) Apple did just that, and today its the world's largest, most profitable tech company. Beyond computers, Apple manufactures iPhones, iPads, Beats headsets, Ear Buds and Air Buds, Apple Watches, and Apple TV. Apple also offers on demand movies, TV and music, not to mention books and news.
Twenty years ago you couldn't open a Mac catalog without be deluged by creative programs and accessories Adobe was a big deal, today not so much. Most people recognize Adobe as the developer of a crap media player
I want to thank you very much for supporting Apple back in the day. I did too, with a 27 person electronics and software development (Linux) firm. It was hard back then because field support was virtually non-existent (unless you did graphics).
Frankly, the creative industry's need for specialized softwares and extremely powerful computers makes me wonder if you and Apple haven't come to a fork in the road, where each goes their own way.
I do think, as one of the commenters on the original thread suggests, that some of the blame lies with the often latent relationship audio software companies have with Apple's release cycle. Ideally QA begins while the OS update is still in beta. This varies quite a bit from company to company, but it's not something to sweep under the rug. The news of audio drop out issues (poison to live performers) persisting through multiple major versions is horrifying though.
> Ideally QA begins while the OS update is still in beta.
Would help a lot if (a) Apple had longer lead times to actually get things right internally before they went to beta and (b) beta cycles were a bit longer and (c) companies didn't have to do this every damn year.
On the other side... what are the benefits of having yearly regimented releases again?
This article is conflating consumer audio and pro audio. Most of the points made in this article != pro audio concerns. I DO NOT CARE that the 1/8" jack is missing from the new iPhone and that has nothing to do with pro audio. I never looked to apple to make studio reference headphones and if I ever used them, it would be to check a mix to make sure that the music sounded ok with the typical users headphones.
Ive used various mac/windows based music platforms over the years since around 1997 and still think Mac is the better platform for audio. Heres why:
1) ios/osx has a baked in low latency audio framework in Core Audio which means even on board audio can run at < 10ms round trip latency
2) Logic is still the most solid DAW Ive ever used
3) Windows has yet to offer a compelling Audio experience with out serious hardware.
I will agree that the new mac pro was a big step backwards from the previous version. I had an 8 core mac pro from 2008 and that was the perfect music pc. Im sure the new one is fine, but I dont care about the aesthetics of the computer as long as I can depend on it to record a session and not fail.
The Native Instruments issues dont really surprise me and in my experience with that company their software quality ranges from buggy to mediocre (Komplete 1-8) to the point were I could not find a compelling reason to continue using their software. I could certainly understand a company acting defensive and blaming the OS manufacturer when they are flooded with bug reports.
To that I would also offer a counterpoints of Propellerheads Reason. Their software is consistently bug free and solid performing. So it does not seem to really be a "Mac" problem. I currently use a universal audio apollo 8 and that also performs solidly via the lightning interface at near real time latency. Point being, its possible to make solid software for mac.
Anyway, I don't think that the mac is perfect for audio, and the situation may be worse for video, it sounds like the new mac pro is a dud for pro users, which is disappointing.
As a semi-pro I tend to disagree with your reasons why Mac is better because 1) Tons of USB 3.0 audio interfaces work with Windows plug & play with <10ms latency (Focusrite comes to mind, Sweetwater lists a ton) that can be paired with any reasonable spec Windows laptop to be just as good and probably for less money [a], 2) Ableton Live and/or Reaper have been extremely solid in ways that yes Logic & ProTools also are solid, but this is a tie to me, and 3) Serious hardware goes back to #1 in that Windows actually has plenty of options that, let's be honest, a real serious Mac-based musician would invest in anyway. The gold standard UAD used to be Mac only but it's on USB 3.0 now so that kind of evens the field.
I grew up with Macs, but when I learned how to manipulate PCs and, to the best of my ability, overcome a lot of the inherent issues. A lot has been budget oriented. VSTs and the like don't run on Mac, that cuts off an entire community!
[a] Also there's ASIO4ALL which runs on a high grade machine pretty dang well - not Core Audio perfect, but it's surprisingly good in my experieince. Just needs like an i5, 8GB RAM and a decent HD (works great with SSDs).
ProTools? its pretty much the industry standard and it also supports your point that its unlikely to be the OS at fault - since most studios i've been in are running mac pros and protools without any issues.
Though protools requires some external hardware iirc
[+] [-] wwweston|9 years ago|reply
Ten years ago there was simply no question in my mind that apple hardware + OS X was the right choice for audio/music production (not to mention a relatively hassle free Unix workstation for developers + some desktop software usage). Twenty years ago? Still Apple.
Over the last 3-4 years, however, I've come to the conclusion that my next purchase needs to be something else if for no other reason than to clearly understand the alternatives.
This is key:
> The bad news: Apple still can’t seem to keep third parties synced up with its now annual release cadence. In a now yearly ritual, Apple has broken plug-in validation for its own Audio Unit format. Open question: why? Why is this now a regular feature of updating an operating system for a format that has basically remained unchanged for years? Why shouldn’t desktop upgrades be the kind of no-brainer mobile upgrades are.
I have a hard time avoiding at least one of two conclusions:
(a) Apple either now lacks the necessary talent to do the quality of work they sustained with OS X for a while
(b) they fundamentally simply do not care at an institutional level
(And if it were really only about Audio Units, that'd be one thing. But it's not.)
[+] [-] beedogs|9 years ago|reply
I recently got rid of a late 2013 Retina MBP in favour of a late 2012 15" RMBP, and the difference in audio performance is astounding. No dropouts anymore, all my plugins work again, and Ableton is once again usable. I was hoping for a difference in performance but I was amazed at how much better the older one performed, with identical memory and SSD disk.
And that's not the only issue I had with the 13" Haswell RMBP. Often it would lose its entire USB chain (which includes the built-in trackpad and keyboard!) which would require me to remote into it to shut it down. Thunderbolt wasn't much better, with frequent network dropouts over a gigabit tb adapter. The poor thing barely worked out of the box and it didn't get much better.
I don't know what happened specifically with Haswell, but it seems like Apple and Intel haven't really been working to ensure it's a stable platform.
It's a mess.
[+] [-] snarfy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coredog64|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavlov|9 years ago|reply
I write Mac software for a YC company in the pro video space. Our new product started deployments a couple of months back, and a major source of problems has been the Apple platform -- both hardware and software. It's so bad that we're actively working to move off the Mac completely. (I've spent 15 years doing Mac software, so this is a big deal for me.)
Apple doesn't have pro hardware anymore. The 2013 Mac Pro is a complete failure, maybe the worst computer they've ever made. We deployed a dozen Mac Pros, and four of them suffer from a GPU overheating problem that's widespread but little talked about -- Apple has been replacing Mac Pros quietly for years.
The original Mac Pro was a great computer for the pro market: lots of extensibility, high-quality cooling system. The new Mac Pro removed all that and offers no benefit to users like us. It's really more like a cylindrical rebirth of the infamous Power Mac G4 Cube.
The same heat problems apply to their laptops. Many MBP models with NVIDIA graphics end up needing yearly motherboard replacements, which Apple is providing through a special replacement program. (My previous MacBook Pro has had this done three times.) Apple's drive towards ever-thinner and ideally fanless computers like the 12" MacBook suggests that this trend isn't going to change. I'm afraid the next MacBook Pro will be the "worst of both worlds", a combination of traits from the 12" MacBook and the Mac Pro.
Meanwhile on the software front, macOS has become an unstable and unpredictable platform for high-performance media applications. The emphasis on power saving, sandboxing and relentlessly throttling down userspace applications has made it quite hard to ensure that all our processes keep ticking along as they should. Working around macOS features designed for fanless laptops is such a waste of time when our deployment environment would ideally be a rackmount old-style Mac Pro.
Looks like there's going to be lots of Windows 10 in my future :(
[+] [-] bo1024|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baldfat|9 years ago|reply
In the 90s as I was buying I actually was going to go with BeOS and had a Tascam DX2424 external hard drive recorder (Thing was awesome). Steinberg, as I was a week away from buying my first Apple computer, pulled the plug on BeOS applications. I went Windows NT Nuendo 1.0. 80% of the studios my size were all ProTools. I HATED ProTools and their hardware lock in.
After a while I kind of got a niche going and I would also work at mixing or engineering things at Apple based studios about once a month. I have always had the unfortunate luck of making every single Mac crash while I use them. I would speak about my frustration and the "Mac Guy" would shake his head and say I don't know as I would have to redo hours of work.
Later on in Video. I would be on Premier or Final Cut Pro and the same thing would happen where I was in the middle of hours long sessions and I would get some crash that wouldn't lose me work anymore but it got me out of "The Zone." If you ever did major video editing you know what that feels like. The Apple "crash" was different because sometime it would take a while to realize that while I have the video gui up what I was doing wasn't actually changing anything, or I couldn't grab a clip from a folder and import it OR the codex just isn't working so I can't see a preview and I would have to reboot.
I hate Apple software like Final Cut Pro because they use their own vocabulary. It was always not the standard vocabulary of the industry pre-digital nor what the other video/audio world was using.
Software Synths (Windows/Linux) seem to just work for me these days. My buddies swear with their Macs they can do the same things and then boom back to sampled sythns after a month or so due to "little issues" but they would never blame their machines or OS. I have noticed a ton more Windows in music performance the past year or two, but I really think that Linux could make a niche in live audio production a reality if the Native Instruments would provide a Linux port.
Non-Apple world is pretty ripe for Apple to lose massive market share like they are seeing the last 3 years in video.
[+] [-] applecore|9 years ago|reply
I can confirm anecdotally that this occurred with a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010). Despite claims that Apple hardware is reliable and holds its value, I'll never buy one of their personal computers again.
[+] [-] 6stringmerc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulrpotts|9 years ago|reply
I have a 2008 Mac Pro that is still incredibly reliable, but I am starting to feel the need for a new computer for music production. And it doesn't look like they will even support the 2008 Pros with the next OS release.
I miss Snow Leopard -- Logic on Snow Leopard was an incredibly solid platform for music production!
I'm contemplating whether it might be possible to do all my music work on Mac Minis. I really like having four hard drives and a tower case...
[+] [-] kirb|9 years ago|reply
Yearly? I know multiple people who need to get their 2011 MacBook Pro motherboard replaced on a monthly basis. One managed to make Apple give in and swap it for an equivalent 2015 model, and the others are still trying…
[+] [-] xoa|9 years ago|reply
Instead they actively expended money making it fundamentally worse, and not just that but making it a zero-sum game. Many people correctly compared the Cylinder (it's hard to resist the more colloquial in our office "trashcan mac") MP to the old Cube in terms of basic thermal and design tradeoffs, but the Cube never inspire active dislike because there was still the MP. On the contrary the small niche of users that actually found its set of tradeoffs worth it had a soft spot for a long time. Nobody lost anything at all from the existence of the Cube, so the only people who got were those fine with it, and anyone else could just look from afar. By making the neoCube the only thing though Apple shot any hope of that.
And the Cylinder was form over function in a way I can't recall from Apple in a very long time, and also seemed a fundamental misreading of what they're good at and what they want to be actively engaged in. The mirror of an easily expandable pro friendly system offering flexibility on user side is that it also provides flexibility on the manufacturer side: because 3rd parties can do more entirely on their own, the manufacturer in turn can get away with doing less because the gaps can be filled in by the market. The more control a manufacturer takes for themselves, the more responsibility falls on their shoulders in turn, which is why command-and-control economics tends to have scalability problems vs approaches that make more use of markets.
At any rate it's a real bummer. I've looked at Xeon hackintosh efforts but that's definitely getting into pretty shaky territory and with Apple abandoning pro systems themselves support is probably only going to get worse. I agree it is time, probably past time, to start planning to abandon the platform but boy will it be painful (closer to 25 years in my case).
[+] [-] addicted|9 years ago|reply
After using nothing but Apple products for a decade, I am being forced to wean myself off them, because I cannot depend on Apple for the tools of my trade. What they've done with their Pro hardware is ridiculous. Even if they release the greatest computers ever released for Pros in a month, their history over the past few years makes them completely unreliable.
Final Cut Pro, Aperture, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, Mac Pro, XServe, OSX Server, form, in one way or another at least a majority of their pro offerings, for any useful definition of the word Pro, and Apple's behavior with these products have ranged from dumbing down, to neglect, to straight up abandonment.
And it's not just pro users, but also "prosumers". iPhoto, Mail, Calendar, iWork all been dumbed down to the point of not being able to serve any prosumer needs.
Apple provides experience and value to consumers that seems far beyond their competitors but their actions towards pro users couldn't have been more clear in their intent. Lip service with an occasional teaser to keep you hooked.
[+] [-] bane|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willtim|9 years ago|reply
EDIT: designed for heavy sustained CPU applications
[+] [-] blurbleblurble|9 years ago|reply
Well, I started getting fed up with Apple ~6 years ago now. After my hard drive crashed, I moved to to producing on exclusively on Linux as a personal, mental and spiritual challenge. This was very difficult in 2011. As much as I wanted Ardour to be what I wanted it to be, the only thing that was stable enough to get stuff done on was QTractor...
Since then, Linux has gotten waayyyy better for music production. KXStudio is excellent. (don't waste time on Ubuntu Studio, it's not configured well). There are plenty of amazing LV2 and LADSPA plugins, and even some good VST plugins like TAL NoizeMaker. Ardour is great if you're lucky to get a stable build. As far as "mainstream pro" music production on linux... it's maybe not quite there yet for a general audience, but if you're a producer/composer/independent artist with some technical patience, Linux audio production is completely amazing. It's a whole different paradigm with plenty of room for professionals. The fact that Jack is totally modular from the get-go is extremely powerful. It means that stuff can be combined in all kinds of ways. (check this thing out if you haven't already: http://moddevices.com/ )
And honestly, Bitwig has completely switched up the whole situation. Right now I'm running Bitwig on Arch and it's beastly. The only thing I miss from Logic are those excellent MIDI editing tools, non-destructive quantize. I'm also missing my favorite LV2 plugins (ZynAddSubFX). But Bitwig has plenty of synths and a fully modular system for creating endless sounds, so I'm set.
Don't need or want Apple at this point. I'm good :)
[+] [-] Keyframe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timc3|9 years ago|reply
Bitwig etc.. runs on Windows as well, but also you get the benefits of using other VST and VSTi vendors.
[+] [-] 72deluxe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bo1024|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cageface|9 years ago|reply
They're lucky Microsoft has been asleep at the wheel for the last few years or actively shooting itself in the foot (Windows 8). But MS seems to be getting its act together lately.
[+] [-] tallanvor|9 years ago|reply
Microsoft had an identity crisis for a number of years where they weren't quite sure where they should go, but their move back to being a platform (with regards to Azure) and making sure that the rest of their lines support that work is starting to pay off. Of course, they do need to tighten things up, especially around Windows... That division in particular seems to be trying to move too quickly and it's showing.
[+] [-] __jal|9 years ago|reply
For a while, I thought they were chasing IOS marketshare hard, and would come back to fixing the desktop. But I'm beginning to wonder if that isn't the intent; I'm sure the 30k-foot-view financials says OS X is now the second-class product.
The problem is that OS X is the generative platform. Writers and programmers and musicians and designers and artists use Macs to produce. And a lot of these folks (me included) are getting restless.
I'll be fine - honestly, I only own one OS X box today, and my main personal desktop is Linux. I'd be annoyed for a while if I had to switch to a Linux laptop, but vim is portable, and if they continue to baby-proof the OS at the expense of automation and traditional Unix tools, it will be less annoying that staying put.
If the plan is to bring iOS to the point where, say, Ableton and Pro Tools runs sufficiently well there, then they better get on that before the OS where those tools do run rots out from under them. And if that isn't the plan, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be very curious to know what it is.
[+] [-] jseliger|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javajosh|9 years ago|reply
If your "only iOS matters" hypothesis is correct than Apple only cares about generative OSX for generating iOS apps. That means keeping XCode working at all costs, and they can safely ignore every other use. I suspect that they understand that apart from students using Pages to write papers, MS and Google own the office productivity space.
The only remaining code to write are highly proprietary front-ends and the occasional mega-backend.
[+] [-] niels_olson|9 years ago|reply
The masses follow the makers. The makers are dissatisfied. Pay attention.
[+] [-] eddieh|9 years ago|reply
Any iMac or MacBook Pro from the last 5 years is sufficient for any pro audio workflow. A Mac Pro is still sufficient and is way overkill. A lot of people can be pretty productive on an iPad too. New Macs are coming, Apple isn't abandoning the Mac.
I just updated to macOS Sierra and all my pro audio equipment has either kept working as is or the manufacturer released a driver update within days of the macOS Sierra release.
[+] [-] wwweston|9 years ago|reply
But the article is not just about the headphone jack, there's an additional half-dozen considerations that you haven't said anything to address other than "works for me." I can assure you that this is not everyone's experience.
[+] [-] wrigby|9 years ago|reply
Just a few days ago, Pro Tools popped up the annoying "A CPU Overload Has Occurred" dialog box while I was working on a mix. Mid-2015 rMBP, 2.5 GHz.
It was a pretty simple session, too - nothing that breaks any rules, like reverbs on inserts. 12 or so tracks and three stereo effects (on their own busses).
I'm amazed every day at how much capability my MBP puts into my hands, but it is not without limitations. To say it's sufficient for any pro audio workflow is a bit of a stretch.
[+] [-] charlesism|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] readymade|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|9 years ago|reply
Pro audio workflows can include more than a hundred tracks, all running demanding plugins.
A MacBook Pro can be good enough for bedroom studios and simple mixes without many tracks, but no one is going to record and mix a film score on one.
[+] [-] walshemj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renaudg|9 years ago|reply
My original comment below :
"...this reveals a deeper, more cultural problem at Apple. The inability to ship OS builds to developers in time for them to adapt..."
I'm a developer and sorry but... no. The first developer preview of Sierra has been available since June 13th. That's 3 full months, and indeed you must have noticed most developers of non-audio apps have spent the summer shipping updates.
Yet somehow in the audio world, all hell breaks loose come September each year, it seems plug-in developers only start looking at the new OS the same day as their customers, and they scramble to make panicked "DO NOT UPGRADE YET !" statements. Not being ready on day 1 is unfortunate, not having started working on it is simply unprofessional, sorry.
But the worst part is that they manage to get away with it, because most of their customers (musicians are notoriously conservative with their computers) nod in approval and go "yeah yeah don't worry, I'm still on MacOS-from-8-years-ago anyway. F* Apple always breaking stuff" (just look at the forums if you don't believe me)
It simply doesn't have to be this way in most cases, and this is the real issue you should be talking about IMHO.
[+] [-] viktorbenei|9 years ago|reply
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...
Quick, simple and easy to run and test with.
[+] [-] gallerytungsten|9 years ago|reply
http://tapeop.com/columns/end-rant/115/
[+] [-] makecheck|9 years ago|reply
For instance, there was absolutely zero reason to release an “update” to GarageBand that outright removed a substantial number of features and destroyed backward-compatibility (I don’t think I had a single song that even SOUNDED THE SAME after opening it in the “improved” version; many settings were just thrown out, or hard to find because they were just moved for no good reason). This is just plain stupid management: inept decision-making that shows a complete lack of respect for the financial and time investments made by previous customers.
And hardware decisions have felt the same. Not only was the Mac Pro not what Pros really needed but even the damn web site for the thing made it impossible to really understand what the machine could actually do. I didn’t want to sit through animations and fancy scrolling just to find a data sheet. You have to have end-to-end, seamless understanding of what you’re trying to do in an endeavor, and this is clueless behavior.
And one last factor makes me wonder: when Apple does so well in the stock market, what does that do to employees? It probably doesn’t take a lot of massive profit from stocks to make people reconsider their jobs; I figure there have to be a few new millionaires who just decided to leave, causing perhaps entirely new teams to take over some projects.
[+] [-] pragmar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 72deluxe|9 years ago|reply
But it's true! At least you could install updates when you wanted, not when your remote masters in Redmond decided.
[+] [-] hasbroslasher|9 years ago|reply
I'm a loyal Logic user (10 years) and a "pro" musician. I started getting worried when Pro X came out. The weird prosumer approach, their poor attempts at beating NI at synths, it all had me worried. Logic used to be fairly bare-bones by comparison but I never had to deal with the kind of bullshit Pro X has thrown at me: whole projects developing strange audio glitches for no apparent reason, constant missing audio files (even on newer tracks), meaningless warnings, system overloads on simple tracks, crashes, you name it. Maybe I was less bitchy when I was 20, but damn, it seems that things have gone downhill.
That doesn't even start on the hardware: $1200 for a computer with sub-optimal hardware pains the engineer in me, especially when the thing breaks every couple of years and has to go to the sandboxed repair store to get fixed.
Like many others in this thread, I leaving for Linux next time and I guess I'll make due with whatever they have.
[+] [-] dharma1|9 years ago|reply
I wish they would sort out the AU validation though.
I don't use Apple headphones or Apple Music - not sure if they have much to do with "Pro Music", whatever that is.
[+] [-] applecore|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isarat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GreggThurman|9 years ago|reply
Back in 1997 I commented on the AOL Apple Forum that Apple should dump the creative community in favor of the larger consumer market. At the time the creative market represented about 1.5% of total computer usage. Mac market share was 2%, but only in the US. Everywhere else it was non-existent.
Not that I had anything to do with it (I didn't) Apple did just that, and today its the world's largest, most profitable tech company. Beyond computers, Apple manufactures iPhones, iPads, Beats headsets, Ear Buds and Air Buds, Apple Watches, and Apple TV. Apple also offers on demand movies, TV and music, not to mention books and news.
Twenty years ago you couldn't open a Mac catalog without be deluged by creative programs and accessories Adobe was a big deal, today not so much. Most people recognize Adobe as the developer of a crap media player
I want to thank you very much for supporting Apple back in the day. I did too, with a 27 person electronics and software development (Linux) firm. It was hard back then because field support was virtually non-existent (unless you did graphics).
Frankly, the creative industry's need for specialized softwares and extremely powerful computers makes me wonder if you and Apple haven't come to a fork in the road, where each goes their own way.
I wish you the very best.
[+] [-] KaiserPro|9 years ago|reply
However at least Jobs told the collected heads of the VFX houses to go fuck themselves in person.
[+] [-] readymade|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wwweston|9 years ago|reply
Would help a lot if (a) Apple had longer lead times to actually get things right internally before they went to beta and (b) beta cycles were a bit longer and (c) companies didn't have to do this every damn year.
On the other side... what are the benefits of having yearly regimented releases again?
[+] [-] S_A_P|9 years ago|reply
Ive used various mac/windows based music platforms over the years since around 1997 and still think Mac is the better platform for audio. Heres why: 1) ios/osx has a baked in low latency audio framework in Core Audio which means even on board audio can run at < 10ms round trip latency 2) Logic is still the most solid DAW Ive ever used 3) Windows has yet to offer a compelling Audio experience with out serious hardware.
I will agree that the new mac pro was a big step backwards from the previous version. I had an 8 core mac pro from 2008 and that was the perfect music pc. Im sure the new one is fine, but I dont care about the aesthetics of the computer as long as I can depend on it to record a session and not fail.
The Native Instruments issues dont really surprise me and in my experience with that company their software quality ranges from buggy to mediocre (Komplete 1-8) to the point were I could not find a compelling reason to continue using their software. I could certainly understand a company acting defensive and blaming the OS manufacturer when they are flooded with bug reports.
To that I would also offer a counterpoints of Propellerheads Reason. Their software is consistently bug free and solid performing. So it does not seem to really be a "Mac" problem. I currently use a universal audio apollo 8 and that also performs solidly via the lightning interface at near real time latency. Point being, its possible to make solid software for mac.
Anyway, I don't think that the mac is perfect for audio, and the situation may be worse for video, it sounds like the new mac pro is a dud for pro users, which is disappointing.
[+] [-] 6stringmerc|9 years ago|reply
I grew up with Macs, but when I learned how to manipulate PCs and, to the best of my ability, overcome a lot of the inherent issues. A lot has been budget oriented. VSTs and the like don't run on Mac, that cuts off an entire community!
[a] Also there's ASIO4ALL which runs on a high grade machine pretty dang well - not Core Audio perfect, but it's surprisingly good in my experieince. Just needs like an i5, 8GB RAM and a decent HD (works great with SSDs).
[+] [-] unprepare|9 years ago|reply
ProTools? its pretty much the industry standard and it also supports your point that its unlikely to be the OS at fault - since most studios i've been in are running mac pros and protools without any issues.
Though protools requires some external hardware iirc