The future of CoreAudio and AudioUnits - a real concern

[bayswater]

There was a sweet period of very-low-problem-sailing in the 10.6.8 days. Since then, bumpy ride.

Interesting you would say this. I've recently been doing a load of work for someone as a background task using an old Mac Mini running 10.6.8. It involves a lot of digital conversion of movies, picture slide and negative scanning, printing, audio processing, DV production, and so on. I'd forgotten how wonderful Snow Lion was. I've had this old Mac running 7/24 for about 6 weeks now without a restart. And I had never noticed until now that my wife's old MacBook also running SL, is also rarely restarted and always just works.

[James Steele]

The Mac trashcan was Apple flexing its design muscles. They've impressed us. Now they can get back to work. We'll see another Mac tower. Probably soon.

It would certainly be nice. The trashcan really doesn't allow tinkering. As touched on in another thread, thanks to the great info provided by HC Markus, I think before I'd get a trashcan, I'd continue to leverage my investment in PCIe cards (MOTU PCIe-424 and UAD-2 DUO) and get myself a Mac4,1 8-core used, buy two hexcore chips for $400, install them and update the firmware and get a machine that rivals the current trashcan in performance.

[James Steele]

And hasn't Apple always been considered a product for snobs? I have been routinely mocked by PC folks since I bought my first Mac Plus way way back when. They called me an "elitist" Speaking of the Mac plus, it was an all in one design based on the original. The core design principal for the Macintosh as far as I'm concerned. I hope to be able to purchase a Mac Pro this year. I can't imagine that I'll have less functionality than I do now.

I guess Apple is like that really great band you loved when you were young. The band that you could see at a local venue and the only other fans were people like you who truly appreciated their greatness. Now that band is selling out stadiums worldwide. Is that a bad thing? Maybe. Maybe not

Good point. I think it was the rollout of the Apple Watch that initially impressed me, but then initial made me uneasy as if all the world is trim and tanned suburban housewives in smart visors and pony tails taking their pulse while on their morning jog on the trail. I can't explain it. It's just a visceral thing. It's sort of the transition from hip computer geekdom in the early days to chic-trendy amongst the well-heeled suburbanites that adore the iGadgets. I do too. I have friends that will rail about how much more you can do with Android phones, etc., but I cling to my iPhone 4 (no compelling need for me to update now). It IS jailbroken however. Part of the problem is I'm so invested in the entire Apple eco-system with Macs, iPads, iPhone, etc. that leaving would be painful and I don't wish to reinvent the wheel. Which, of course, is one reason people are loathe to switch DAWs. After many years, there's a big investment in time (spent learning it) and money that things have to be REALLY bad (like, umm.. DP6 bad) to get you to walk away. Truth be told, it wasn't until the rough days of DP 6.0 that I bought a copy of Logic Express just to get my feet wet... just in case. Thankfully, MOTU bounced back from that one, as I just couldn't warm to Logic.

[Shooshie]

Truth be told, it wasn't until the rough days of DP 6.0 that I bought a copy of Logic Express just to get my feet wet... just in case. Thankfully, MOTU bounced back from that one, as I just couldn't warm to Logic.

Oh man! You and me, both!

[mikehalloran]

The Mac trashcan was Apple flexing its design muscles. They've impressed us. Now they can get back to work. We'll see another Mac tower. Probably soon.

Will it have a serial port, modem and floppy drive? How about SCSI or a Zip drive, too? I'm trying to count the number of times that Apple has gone backwards because of user outcry...



"I believe that ship has sailed."

[Michael Canavan]

I predict a future Mac Pro (or other named pro-Mac) with more of the tower form-factor, but smaller components. Apple has proved that you can get all that into a small space, and that's a good thing, but it's got to be expandable. With the availability of 1TB thumb drives, "expansion" becomes a new game. But I don't think that a round form factor can last. Railroads once experimented with round hopper cars, but tunnels and bridges were still rectangular, so they gradually went back to forms that fit clearances for maximum loading. It's not a design limitation, it's a real-world limit. "Round" works for planets, balloons, ant beds, and things that must keep a certain distance from a central core, but to fill space efficiently in manufacturing, rectangles are just easier.

The Mac trashcan was Apple flexing its design muscles. They've impressed us. Now they can get back to work. We'll see another Mac tower. Probably soon.

Shooshie

The part in bold, you explained yourself why the trashcan design works, the fan is large and doesn't have harsh angles to deliver noise, it blows the air out very efficiently.

Although it will take a while to adapt, Thunderbolt is just as good as PCIe, and that's where the expansion is going to come from. Apple has never been that happy with graphics and other mods to their machines, so the basics will have to come from them, but I don't see the trashcan going away anytime soon, some of the things we want to do are problems for them, and "solved" by forcing vendors off of the power supply that PCIe and SATA offers. Thunderbolt allows some distance from possible Apple Care tech support calls.

At some point it will be an non issue, but I get why people are upset, I'm not migrating to a trash can anytime soon, that's some serious cash to future proof the thing etc.

[Shooshie]

The part in bold, you explained yourself why the trashcan design works, the fan is large and doesn't have harsh angles to deliver noise, it blows the air out very efficiently.

Although it will take a while to adapt, Thunderbolt is just as good as PCIe, and that's where the expansion is going to come from. Apple has never been that happy with graphics and other mods to their machines, so the basics will have to come from them, but I don't see the trashcan going away anytime soon, some of the things we want to do are problems for them, and "solved" by forcing vendors off of the power supply that PCIe and SATA offers. Thunderbolt allows some distance from possible Apple Care tech support calls.

At some point it will be an non issue, but I get why people are upset, I'm not migrating to a trash can anytime soon, that's some serious cash to future proof the thing etc.

The trashcan works. Yes, it's a serious design triumph. But it's a pain to manufacture, and replacing or substituting components is difficult to impossible. Drives have to be off-loaded, as do PCI devices and everything else. It's not a pro-tower; it's the core to a pro-tower. Pretty soon people are going to get tired of paying that much extra and getting that much less, then STILL having to pay more for PCI architecture and SATA architecture external to the can. It's more to buy (and costs helluva lot more), more to maintain, more desktop (or wherever) footprint, more cables and associated clutter. The trashcan works and is impressive not just because it's round, but because half the stuff is left out! People will be buying Mac Pro towers for years and years on eBay if Apple does not step up to the plate and offer a reconciliatory product. The tower form factor exists for a reason. You can shrink all the components and make it smaller, but you've still got to provide the box and connections to put those components in.

Apple will not get away with this omission for long without repercussions. Either people will abandon the Mac, use old Mac Pro towers, or Apple will give them what they want. The whole thing just kind of stinks, IMO.

On the one hand, Apple makes the iMac, which is an all-in-one form factor. It's clean with virtually no cables, but you cannot expand it from within. A couple of external drives, and you're good to go. Everyone has a few externals, so that's no big deal. But when you make a professional tower, it's understood from the start that you need tons of storage. There will be internal SSDs, external 4TB drives, in addition to all the stuff that is available via PCI architecture. To offload all that stuff is the antithesis of what Apple has been about: clean lines, minimal clutter.

As for the fan, I'd be surprised if the trashcan is quieter than my Mac Pro tower. If not for hard drives accessing, I'd never know it was on. I appreciate the technical display Apple has created in the trashcan, but for the reasons I stated above, it'll never really give creative professionals what they want. If Apple is stubborn and holds out long enough, we may all give in and buy it, simply because we're NOT going to migrate to PC. I've been using Macs for 31 years now. Over half my life. I'm not going to try to get up to speed on a PC. I'll be forever dependent on tech support if I try that.

I don't think I'm unique in any way in regard to this discussion. Apple is going to see their pro-tower sales fall after a year or two. They can abandon us to recycled tech, or they can give us what we believe is practical, but fewer people will buy trashcans than the old towers, at least after the "wow factor" wears off.

My opinion only,

Shoosh

[Shooshie]

The Mac trashcan was Apple flexing its design muscles. They've impressed us. Now they can get back to work. We'll see another Mac tower. Probably soon.

Will it have a serial port, modem and floppy drive? How about SCSI or a Zip drive, too? I'm trying to count the number of times that Apple has gone backwards because of user outcry...

Not user outcry, but sales.

A quick look at dozens of Mac designs that folded after a year or two will reveal that Apple has a long shadow of discontinued products that were first touted as big advances. The Mac Cube is a classic one. What was the reason it didn't sell? Because it was expensive like a pro machine, yet you could not put anything in it. Exactly what I'm saying about the trashcan.

Your jokes about old tech have no relevance here. A new Mac Pro tower (not a trashcan form) with Thunderbolt would be the design that people were hoping for, but never got. I believe Apple will give that to us at some point, or else they'll abandon the pro market while blaming us for not buying the great stuff they designed for us. If you have no need for PCI, and if your needs for storage can be satisfied with a couple of external drives, then the trashcan may be the computer for you. But if you need a dozen drives, PCI cards, graphics card, and RAM, the trashcan is just a flop. You have to buy other boxes to house that stuff, and NO graphics card.

I may be wrong, but I was right about the Cube, the 20th Anniversary Mac, and a bunch of other Macs that were too limited by their form, including the original 128K Mac, Mac Pro and the Mac SE. They were great designs for their time, but just too limited. People needed to put other stuff inside those machines. They needed monitor flexibility, and especially COLOR! They got what they wanted.

I love the look, size, and appeal of the trashcan design. I'd like to buy one. But I don't want to get stuck with abandon-ware, when Apple goes back to the tower form, so I'll wait as long as I can before breaking down and getting one. I think most people are more like me, having been stung in the past by getting stuck with cool designs that were too limited.

— Nobody liked modems. We all wanted to be connected to the internet, directly. Of course, we still have modems; they're just DSL modems, WIFI modems, or Cable modems. They stay connected all the time, instead of dialing up and occupying your phone line.
— Floppies? We all knew they were long in the tooth. I was happy to see them go.
— SCSI was a terrible technology. Fast, but unreliable, and subject to a variety of problems. SO glad to see it go.
— Zip drives? Just floppies on steroids. I'm surprised we even have optical drive bays. Flash drives on USB 3.0 could easily put an end to CDs and DVDs. Instead of buying a boxed set of The Complete Simpsons TV Series on DVD, we could buy one USB-3 thumb drive with all of them. I don't copy files to DVD anymore, but to thumb drives, both for my convenience, and for sending to other people. So, there are options for towers. They can be smaller and incorporate tech from the trashcan, but I just think people want a computer with a single footprint, capable of holding 5 or 6 drives, and some sort of expansion space, which could be PCI cards or some replacement, but internally so that they don't have to buy a whole separate chassis with its own fans, power cord, and connector cable. Small is good, but not when you achieve it by leaving out stuff you still have to buy. We have iMacs for that. The Mac Pro tower eliminated external clutter. Now it generates it.

Again, it's just my opinion, but the reality is nothing like you described.

Shooshie

[bayswater]

I'm trying to count the number of times that Apple has gone backwards because of user outcry...



"I believe that ship has sailed."

There was one time. Their first release of Logic (V6?) had no upgrade price. They reversed that decision.

But I agree -- the tower with slots is dead. What happened to the discussion about expansion chassis that connect to TB?

[mikehalloran]

A number of Apple designs have failed. I'm sure that we could find a dozen. That's not the point. I asked how often have they gone backwards and you did not provide an example to answer that question. When Apple discontinues something, it tends to remain dead.

The only thing I see being resurrected is SCSI. Over Ethernet, the current version makes TB2 look like an ox cart. Right now, you need a military budget to afford it and security clearances to see what they're doing with it but that could change.

Interesting that you mentioned the Cube...
http://gizmodo.com/the-brilliant-insani ... -512574427

>sales< Bad example.

That new plant in Texas hired 1,200 to build the nMP. No layoffs that I have heard of. There are units in the store now but build to order is a minimum 10 days. Apple believes the product to be a success at the moment and every employee I know says the same.

The sales of all Macs makes up about 10% or 11% of Apple's revenue depending how you interpret their reports. That includes notebooks, iMacs, minis and the nMP. That 11% is 30% of the premium PC market, btw, an enviable number for any company. The lack of a tower is not hurting the bottom line.

I'm not arguing that Apple shouldn't have updated the tower. There's certainly a market for it. But they didn't and it's not coming back. There's no development team looking at this.

Feel free to write reams on how I blew it if it ever comes back. For now, I'm pretty certain that I am right.

[mikehalloran]

It seems to me that there may be a business opportunity for the right reseller. Buy Mac Pros, hotrod them with better CPUs, a PCIe blade for the system drive, perhaps a second 1T SSD and offer them for a premium. Include a decent warranty and stand behind the product for a few years...

This would have to be better than the hackintoshes out there. Are there enough used MP 4.1 and 5.1 out there?

The question is if there's enough of a market to make it profitable? You couldn't sell them into Europe, unfortunately.

[billf]

A number of Apple designs have failed. I'm sure that we could find a dozen. That's not the point. I asked how often have they gone backwards and you did not provide an example to answer that question. When Apple discontinues something, it tends to remain dead.

I have no argument to make on the success of the Trashcan Mac, but I'm not sure equating a return to the form factor of a tower is a step backwards Mike. A tower design (or some sort of desktop where parts are replaceable) could reappear if Apple were to determine there is sufficient market demand for it. But that is not necessarily a step backwards is it?

[Shooshie]

I'm not arguing that Apple shouldn't have updated the tower. There's certainly a market for it. But they didn't and it's not coming back. There's no development team looking at this.

Feel free to write reams on how I blew it if it ever comes back. For now, I'm pretty certain that I am right.

You really think Apple is always going to make a cylindrical computer for their pro line? When PCI has evolved into something small, hard drives have shrunk, and all components are a fraction of their current size, why wouldn't Apple return to a rectangular shape, with space and connections inside for some of these things? There's simply no practical reason to continue developing a cylindrical computer.

If Apple's idea of progress is to take their inspired tower design, with its latched door, sliding components, and easy connection for up to 6 internal hard drives, and drag its guts out onto your desktop, with power cords and cables strewn everywhere, then I think Apple has lost its vision. It's a beautiful computer — by itself. But it's also an eviscerated computer if you need any of those guts they dragged out of it. Sure, it's selling. It's the fastest thing out there. But when people wake up one day and realize they've spent $10K putting all those guts on their tables, with RAID boxes that have their own fans, while Joe PC can still buy it all for under $3500, I think the beauty of their cylinder is going to fade, and they'll start engineering for productivity again.

But I'm repeating myself for about the 5th time, so I'll shut up. Still, if I were you, I wouldn't place a lot of monetary bets on the longevity of that cylinder.

[bayswater]

You really think Apple is always going to make a cylindrical computer for their pro line?

I expect the shape is a mix of functional design and aesthetics, and could change, but I don't think the basic concept, essentially closed standalone units that can talk to each other, and work like an appliance, is going to change for a while. I can see why Apple is no longer interested in the old open system approach. It's a shrinking market with low margins, small production runs, and demanding customers. Not the sort of thing the shareholder wants. And lest we forget, it's all about the shareholder.

[SixStringGeek]

I don't see it getting dropped or anything. Work continues on it. Of course most of the recent work has been either 1) porting it to ios so ipads can be DAWs and games can use plugins for their audio and 2) making more of the api Objective C friendly (its written in C and C++ for performance reasons as Objective C message dispatch is marginally more expensive than C++ virtual function calls).

As far as I know Doug Wyatt is still helming CoreAudio's future at Apple. You might recall Opcode's OMS - that was Doug again. CoreAudio is OMS for modern operating systems.

CoreAudio/CoreMIDI has everything in it you need to build a DAW from scratch - all you need to do is configure the components and write a user interface (this is all Jambalaya is - a UI atop CoreAudio). All of the routing of audio is pumped through a structure called an AUGraph. AudioUnits are nodes in the graph. Apart from our VI and FX plugins, CoreAudio provides mixers, hardware endpoints, and various other audio processors for things like sample conversion and timepitch conversions.

It is easy to use and seems to work really well...which brings me to wondering if anyone is actually using it. DP, ProTools, Emagic/Logic, etc....these all pre-date the advent of CoreAudio. It makes me wonder if they are using the core AUGraph (which is developed along with and optimized for the OS) or are they still using their homegrown audio engines? My guess is the later except perhaps for Logic because Apple has the ability to force the Logic team to dogfood CoreAudio just to make sure it really works.

Regardless...I don't see CoreAudio falling off the map - it is heavily used for all things audio in OSX and iOS. I just don't know if the DAW industry uptake has gone beyond being able to open and call AudioUnits.