Apple is moving to their own ARM processors. How long will it take Steinberg to develop an ARM version of Nuendo for Mac?
Regardless of when, I expect this will massively slow down development of all our favourite audio software like it does every time Apple coughs.
I suppose Steinberg (and most other audio companies) will have to follow. The market share is going to be too big to ignore.
Truly annoying move from Apple for the (pro) audio community.
More pro(audio) community. I doubt they will port logic
They already showed a version of logic running on arm during the keynote presentation.
Logic has already been ported to ARM Macs. Also Chris Randall from Audio Damage posted on Twitter saying he ported Quanta to ARM in an hour, and it was easier than either the Intel or 64-bit transition.
Given the complexity of many DAWs including Nuendo, I’m sure there are a bunch of edge cases that need to be rewritten, but it’s not like anyone has been writing x86 Assembly by hand anymore.
It was way worse with the previous transitions because entire APIs were left behind and not brought to the new architecture, but this time Apple is bringing everything over (including totally deprecated stuff like OpenGL – they’re really going the extra mile here to make this as smooth as possible). So I think people are going to be surprised at how (relatively) fast this will happen.
My thinking and reality often have very little in common.
Well I guess SB can spend the next couple of years ‘porting’ instead of ‘developing’ and charge a nice update fee at the end! But of course they have to do it.
If I’m honest the developments in Nuendo haven’t done a lot for my work anyway ( ok low end documentary edit/mix ) for years . Even the 10+ year wait to get a multi-edit tool looks to have been given less than a minutes thought… I just wish workflow efficiencies were a priority. There so many great suggestions in the forums and so few actually ever get implemented.
Hello,
My useless opinions - Apple said a couple of things during the presentation that mattered to me.
- They will continue to support Intel Macs.
- They are still coming out with unannounced Intel Macs.
Naturally no timelines mentioned but I personally am not particularly worried. The new MP7.1 is an impressive beast used heavily in audio and won’t be useless in two years, the newest laptops are impressive, and Apple has a history of supporting most of their products for quite a while.
I’ve spoken to a couple of developers who said this transition, while not painless, promises to be easier for them as the Xcode tools are pretty easy to deal with so far. Those who haven’t migrated to Metal graphics will have a few performance issues. I specifically asked how many are using some embedded x86 assembly and all of them have moved away from that. I’m not sure how representative of all developers that is.
This is speculation, no one knows when Intel will be unsupported, but I think we’ll be fine for quite a while, probably a few more generations of professional machines.
My useless opinions only,
Hugh