The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
They're going to have to wait until the synth industry gets their act together and ports to Apple Silicon though. The DAW/music ecosystem is notoriously bad at these kinds of transitions. Due to how VSTs work, if any of your plug-ins are not ARM compatible, you have to run the whole plug-in host and all plug-ins under Rosetta, with the performance drop and stability compromises that that entails. And a lot of plug-in makers are going to want you to pay for an upgrade to the latest version that is released with ARM support.<p>That said, 4-5 years down the line when this whole transition is over on macOS, it's going to be great. And for anything not relying on live synth/processing, you don't need many/any plug-ins at all, so that'll work well today.<p>Personally, I'm really looking forward to doing real-time / live audio set-ups on my M1 Macs under Linux as soon as next year. The design of the M1, beyond just performance, is almost certainly much better than any x86 box for real-time processing, and likely capable of much lower latencies (due to x86 junk like SMBIOS and their power management approach killing worst case latencies; x86 can't match ARM embedded systems for real-time stuff, but M1 <i>is</i> from the embedded world). And since it's Linux, all the open source stuff is already ported to ARM, and the wine hack I use to run a few Windows VSTs ought to be compatible with shoving them under qemu-user without disturbing the rest of the set-up.