General Question: What has Apple changed in Big Sur exactly??

[taka]

Hi--

This is just a general question, I'm curious...
What has Apple changed in OS 11 exactly, which seems to be causing so much headaches in many companies?
MOTU seems to be one of the harder-hit companies from this transition, can any Mac expert here chime in?

Thank You-
Taka*

[Michael Canavan]

So we're all armchair experts on this stuff, but that said you can observe a transition in progress with Catalina and Big Sur to M1 chips. Basically Apple has depreciated and outright dropped support for various ways that developers would code the GUI for Mac OS. The basic things I know about this are that almost all the actual DSP and audio code in a program like DP is in C++ which is cross platform, works on Linux even. The rest of the code is the GUI which controls the way you interact with the DAW, what you see on the screen and how it behaves under a mouse etc. This is almost entirely platform specific code. GUI code on Mac OS has changed drastically over the years, so sometimes developers are able to use workarounds for depreciated code, and that gets them by, but especially with Apple switching to a new chip architecture this isn't going to work and means a complete rewrite of the GUI.

So MOTU might have a hard time of it, this is true. The older the DAW IMO the more chance of depreciated code. The one glimmer of hope here is they recently made the entire GUI scalable. So they hopefully while doing so did what they could to get rid of depreciated code. So that leaves it possible that DP becomes one of the first DAWs behind the dreaded Logic and R word to become Apple Silicon native. My personal guess is the R word gets out of beta soon, then maybe Bitwig. I can't tell between Studio One, Cubase and DP which will come in next after that, but MOTU are pretty optimistic about the M1 in general so that leaves me to conclude they're making good progress on a port.

MOTU are historically tight lipped about upgrades and even updates to DP, but Matt has mentioned for about 6 months now that there's some cool things he can't talk about on the horizon. You can guess that they have a new version that's looking good, but now they want to make it Apple Silicon compatible on the day it's introduced. When that happens is anybodies guess, but I guess my bigger point is this: MOTU are not far behind in terms of DAWs on Apple Silicon, Logic hardly counts, we still don't see but one other DAW AS ready at this point and it's in a public beta stage.

[bayswater]

MIchael, I assume your answer to "what has Apple changed" is they made it work with the new chips. I had a similar take-away from a conversation with the manager of a local Apple store. He suggested that Apple's software development since at least OS X 10.6 has been to align software with hardware. The way he put it is "the software is always chasing the hardware, but never catches up". The corollary is there is not a big priority on improving the performance on last year's hardware.

Improvements on existing systems was an advertising point on OS updates a long time ago. But that changed somewhere around iOS 7 which actually downgraded performance of earlier generation iPhones, and OS X versions about the same time. Now, we're all happy when an OS X update doesn't actually make our less than brand new Macs perform worse.

The lesson for me is to stop worrying about what something like Big Sur does. It's for people with new Macs, and they pretty much need it, and developers need to deal with it to get new customers. For the rest of us, "there's nothing to see here".

[mikehalloran]

For the rest of us, "there's nothing to see here".

Something like that.

I have Big Sur running on my old MBP. It’s not worse but I don’t notice anything better and nothing that’s compelling me to upgrade. Someone was telling me about an app that requires OS 11 but it’s not one I use so am passing for now.

I expect to pick up an AS Mac before the end of the year. I’ll worry then.

[Michael Canavan]

MIchael, I assume your answer to "what has Apple changed" is they made it work with the new chips.

More or less, but IMO there's some advantage to software getting updated for Big Sur even if you're not on Big Sur. Developers can use some pretty ancient code, which of course doesn't run that well on current computers and OS's. I'm not talking about your 3 year old OS and 6 year old computer here, I'm talking about things like Native Instruments not being able to do VST3 or resizable GUI's until they change completely their 15 year old GUI framework.

Just like any of us, developers can be guilty of "if it ain't broke.." which leads to ancient code that's been depreciated sticking around for too long and eventually causing all kinds of problems.
Microsoft Windows 10 is still piled on top of some just whack things. I had to reinstall the entire OS for my renter, her computer had slowed to 1/20th of it's speed. So we bought her a new SSD, replaced her boot drive and installed Win10 etc. because I'd done dozens of things to fix her computer going into Command Prompt and Terminal etc. etc. and its still read 100% disk use etc.

So yeah, depreciating old code, eventually forcing developers to stop using it, it's a big hassle for them. Windows is way more backwards compatible being that it serves such random hardware, but at least we don't have an OS that literally kills itself every once in a while.

[taka]

Thank you guys for the replies

I didn't know that they changed the GUI framework for OS11, it makes sense why so many companies are taking long time to adapt--
I'm happily running OS10.15 in my studio, so OS11 isn't really a major concern at the moment, hopefully this transition will result in improved performance in DP11 (or 10.5)
Taka*