A Call to ARMs

Greetings outlander! Gather in for a story, about warring global tech conglomerates, and the strange creatures that orbit them. Events foretold are coming to pass! Yes I’m talking about WWDC 2020!

Previously I have written about the eventual iPad-ification of the Mac, and boy howdy… it’s pretty iPaddy this year. ARM-based Macs have been announced, and developers are now scrambling to figure out how to port their current Mac apps to this new chip architecture. Apple expects to deliver the first consumer ARM Mac sometime this year. Some big companies have already begun rebuilding for this (Microsoft, Adobe).

So on a surface level, we’re going to have to start thinking about how we’re going to get our old Mac software over to these new machines. On a deeper level, running MacOS on the same chip as an iPad means that we will have real software compatibility between the two platforms. Apple has also shown us that these new Macs will run iOS and iPad apps straight out of the box. No Catalyst, no intermediating software layer. iOS apps will run natively on this new hardware.

So this is all very exciting, and there are many deeper implications to explore (such as when are we going to get touch-based Macs). But what does this mean in the near term for iOS music apps?

The first thing that comes to mind is AUv3 plugins. It’s likely that we will eventually be looking at MacOS apps that host AUv3 plugins. That’s going to drop a pretty huge amount of music software right into Mac workflows. It’s also going to make iOS software more credible as “Pro” software. For years and years iOS has shown a tendency to drive software prices down, and showcase apps that people love to play with, but are not very productive or professional. This will almost certainly alleviate that trend, by making iPad software useable with a mouse and keyboard, and by associating iOS apps with a an OS people associate with productivity (The Mac). For years we’ve been wondering when iPads were going to get “real” pro quality software. This is an answer.

So what is Catalyst a catalyst for? Its catalysing a new flow of software to the Mac, and in reverse, a new flow of features to the iPad. Simply by virtue of now being Mac compatible, I think there will be a backward influence of more desktop-like features on iOS.

On the PC side, the music software market has largely been insulated from the effects of the various App Stores. The PC market is dominated by huge players who make really expensive software, called DAWs. Everyone else just makes plugins for those entrenched Host applications, like Cubasis, Ableton Live, Logic, etc. It’s still unclear how that market will be affected. Once AUv3 plugins are widely available on Mac, there’s a real possibility that VST software will lose some value. Though I think the hope is, that instead of ruining the high value and quality of Mac apps, there will be a kind of equalization, where iPad software becomes more powerful and high value, and the Mac software market will become more squishy and ripe for new innovative software.

Hopefully the injection of new software from iOS, and new interactions enabled by yet-to-be-announced Mac hardware, will create fertile ground for a market that has become ossified.