Last week, Apple unveiled their future at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference. There was much hoopla for all of Apple’s new technology, and saw everyone on stage repeatedly so thrilled and really excited to tell you all about the stuff that their energy drink fuelled all-weekers (all nighters are for wimps) will deliver in the coming months
But importantly for us DJs was the announcement of MacOS. Yes, OS X is dead (well… renamed at least), along with having to hear heathens refer to it as Oh Ess Ecks since day one. And with this announcement comes a beta, dubbed Sierra, available as of last week at the Apple Developer site. I know, because thanks to my lemming tendencies I have a developer account and routinely chuck shaky betas at my Apple hardware for shits and giggles. And do this in the full knowledge that my mission critical Adobe Premiere or Photoshop will no doubt choke. But I just don’t care — behold the field in which I grow my… well you know the rest.
So as of 15th June, you (the industry with developer accounts) have been able to install and check out if your latest and greatest, or for that matter oldest and dearest will play nice with the new spangly MacOS, or will throw a hissy fit and refuse to work at all.
As we have seen and suffered with El Capitan, there is every chance that said hissy fit will be thrown, especially as MacOS is likely to be more than just a rebadge with a few new tricks. The underlying OSes are converging, and there will be many hurdles to jump before it’s all one perfectly coherent blob of an OS. You need to be ahead of the curve.
BE PREPARED
So my message to the industry is this — I know you’re all at breaking point resource wise, but could you just go right ahead and grab the MacOS Sierra beta and give it a whirl with your stuff, that’d be great. I know it’s really not your fault, and were royally reamed by Apple with El Capitan. But we’ve been here many times before, and it’s time to learn something from the harsh lessons, or you are doomed to repeat them and piss off aka lose more loyal customers.
To be clear — nobody is expecting all the new features to be fully integrated from day one. I don’t expect to DJ Siri to be in full effect, or to have some complex Messages based request system up and running. We just want to be sure that we can install it, and our current DJ setup isn’t going to cry and rock in the corner muttering “it’s El Capitan all over again”.
More than anything, we’d like to know that the industry is looking into this ahead of time. Being kept informed (like Rane’s never ending battle with El Capitan) makes us feel much better about companies. My wife once schooled me on being late, and how the secret is communication. If I was going to be late, calling home to tell her is a better plan that not telling her at all and making her mad. So tell us what’s happening, rather than issuing a press release saying you’re not supporting MacOS just yet on the day MacOS is released.
SUMMING UP
Remember this — new customers are less likely if existing customers are unhappy. Word of mouth really does matter. And customer service when things go wrong is considerably more important than adding some new feature that just a handful of people might like. So sure up your foundations, do everything you can to make certain that your user base remains happy, and the rest will fall into place.
The MacOS beta is available to developers now, and a public beta is coming in July.
So glad i don’t use a Mac. What a suckfest
What’s the point in commenting then?
To be smug. I learned it from watching you, Mac users!
Yeah, I’m jealous. This proves another point – you hating Mac guys have way too much time.
It was tongue in cheek. I don’t hate Mac or their users. Just making bad jokes. Mark is right about OS’s needing to fix the stability of their platforms before adding new features though. That goes for Mac and Windows. Throwing new features into a broken or faulty OS does not help the end users.
One has do something while downloading drivers and restarting.
Clearly your missing out.
Should you be busy looking for the latest drivers for your SoundBlaster?
From the handful of comments already, it’s clear the direction this is going. And it stops here. This post is a call for the industry to take an early look at the new MacOS and keep us informed of progress. It is not an open door for yet another pointless circular Mac vs PC flame war where nobody wins. You’re better than this. Thanks.
indeed. such a pointless debate in this day and age. it literally comes down to what sort of gestures your prefer to use on your trackpad. besides that, they are functionally identical platforms///
To be fair, it’s a bit more “under the hood” than that. It comes down to… do want a raw stream from core audio or can you live with a couple ms of latency from ASIO? This day and age the amount of system memory available closes the gap a little, but both OS could use stability improvements over features.
Just don’t do this on your MBP that you use for gigs, mine is still on Yosamite for stability.
Stability improvements over features seems to be the main call in a few articles now. If things get bad enough maybe stability will be as marketable as new stuff.
Stability was the marketable trait of Mac and OSX, people paid a premium for it.
well said!
With all due respect, most the Mac OS (or osx) updates are totally unnecessary BS. And you always, ALWAYS want to upgrade osx/whatevs at the latest possible time. Jumping onboard a spanky new apple os is a great way to shoot yourself on the foot.
ps all those keynotes where shiny eyed ppl rant about “NEOUW KALENDAR FEETCHZ” with roaring applauds, that ish riight there makes me ashamed of being a mac/ios user. Seriously wtf
Sadly not all of us have the luxury of a dedicated music machine (well, I do) and for various reasons – such as support for an application update that fixes a standing fault, or corporate or technical requirements – there’s a necessity for updating to the latest OS iteration.
And you weren’t the target audience for WWDC: not users, but developers. With the addition of new features (even to only the calendar) are likely additional API hooks that can be leveraged by others.
Corporate requirements for becoming a betatester for Apple? I don’t think so, unless you work @apple or are a software developer. Corporations are usually quite conservative regarding OS/system upgrades, and for a good reason. You cannot afford to lose time chasing not-yet-resolved OS issues when every minute counts money.
And I am not talking about the WWDC but all Apple keynotes in general.
And for the developers? Please. I know enough devs to know that they skip the keynotes and just dl the devtools & documentation.
PS I am sorry if people get butthurt and take my opinions personally – it’s “just my 2 cents” as usual, and not directed to any person. /rant
A brilliant contribution! Thank you.
I hope you feel better now.
I just do not understand why you’d not want to wait about a year before updating OS. Usually the “improvements” are very minor and nothing one cannot live without.
I do understand the point of the article, manufs should be faster to fix what Apple breaks. But really, no-one is forcing an immediate update to the latest and greatest
What about those who buy a new Mac because their old one breaks? Or maybe other software that requires a particular OS version or new feature? I get the whole if it’s not broke mantra, but at the same time we should not have to wait many months to start using cool new stuff on our Macs.
Well, that is a very unfortunate position to be in IMHO. I’d either wait it out, risk facing terrible issues, or buy an “intermediary” mac 2nd hand.
I do not upgrade until I know it is stable and tested, but that’s not the point.
I still think you contribution was just a stupid rant.
it was an opinion, not a contribution. The idea that device/software manufacturers could be ahead of Apple and release solid content on day 1 of an Apple OS release is absurd. I have been with Apple since system 7 (before OSX) and if there is something I have learned, it is that Apple always fucks the 3rd parties on every update.
Please stop.
I don’t want to confuse you more, but an opinion can be a contribution.
Usually opinions do not start with “I just do not understand…”. This would suggest an introduction to a question, which would also be a contribution.
But why, oh why am I wasting my time providing basic education on line?
I was really loving my acer, win 10, 2gb vid card, which cost only $480, until some stupid update removed the chance to tell it I wanted line-in when i plugged into the headphone port.(vdj 8 dvs with a ‘y-cable in’ and ‘usb out’ to the mixer is simple and fun)
Had to fidget with it forever just to get that function back. And again, i think that a ‘linux running mixxx built in’ approach can be better than dealing with laptops.
Pro audio isn’t important to hardware or software co’s, shopping is. Personal computers/ phones/tablets will continually go towards shopping and data mining, so pro audio needs to create/define it’s own processing devices.
Did anyone notice that issue is less painful (even not perfect neither) in iOS devices? Sometimes Core Audio is messed and broke some apps but most of them are coded over dedicated APIs (mostly coded by the same app code) over a dedicated hardware and class compliancy… Maybe is dedicated drivers which broke Serato/Traktor with El capitan?
iDevices are growing exponentially in powerhouse terms meanwhile the whole system works flawless with 2gb of ram memory.
I suspect Apple is doing the same movement shift with Arm-Intelx86 than it made with intelx86-PPC and soon or later will release laptop or similar with Arm core… Maybe this is the reason behind use old hardware (well Intel delays didn’t help) well tested and why upgrading your old mac make them fly but also Apple is cutting the upgrading possibility (soldered ram and ssd) so and so…
We are entering in the market phase of dedicaed hardware solutions (Pioneer) and computer based is getting stuck (brands focusing on IoT and Data minning (kuvo, pyro…) so maybe next big thing could be IA applied to music entertainment and less djing?
And yet the SL4 does still not work under El Capitan, neither SL3 or SL2. Will that change with MacOS? Don’t think so. So good point! But what about existing problems?
Isn’t that a Rane issue? Denon DS1 works fine on El Capitan.
SL3 Works fine. SL4 and SL2 are both in beta.
http://dj.rane.com/forums/viewforum/25/
If I can find the time I am going to install Sierra onto my second MacMini and test at home. I’m one of the people who has had the audio dropout/stutter issue found in Mavericks, Yosemite and El Capitan (IOAudioStream errors in Console Logs corresponding with the time of the dropout if you want to check your logs), which has been proven to be an issue with Core Audio that Apple need to fix. Hopefully in Sierra they’ve addressed this.
My MacBook Air that I use every week for DJing will continue to have Mountain Lion 10.8.5 and Traktor Pro 2.6.8 installed however, as this is STABLE with no audio dropouts, and that is the absolute most important factor when you use computers instead of USB sticks, CD’s or vinyl.
Just by a windows 10 machine no problems at all for now ;) Or install windows on your mac. If you are a professional DJ(that uses a notebook) i should buy one just for deejaying and just don’t update it. Never change a winning team. It is not like there any killer features released in 4 to 5 years a notebook lasts on average.
I will leave this here for developers looking into 10.12. This will probably be one of the biggest issue for non-App Store apps and should be dealt with before the new OS ships.
http://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2016/06/29/sierra-and-gatekeeper-path-randomization/