Yeah, but iLok especially, but Mac music-production software as a whole always has the stench of death about it. Even the Intel->Apple CPU transition was awful, with many (super performance-intensive, latency-sensitive) audio software packages running on Rosetta for years... many years.
iLok is, I think, an accidental monopolist like Adobe Flash in the era just before Steve's famous Thoughts on Flash. Terrible product, content to milk it to the end, no intention or capability of fixing it.
I have a couple iLok USB sticks (that are like $75) and the only purpose of them is so my music shit (from various vendors) keeps working when iLok servers are down.
But the flip side of this is this: I am just a hobbyist with no professional use of this stuff — I just love having all these (simulations/emulations of) retro guitar amps and various effectors and mixing consoles that to my (non-pro, non-audiophile) ear sound indistinguishable from the real thing, and would have cost a couple million dollars back in the 1990s.
But even in my case, the dollar value of this stuff is a lot more than the Mac I run it on. So most of the time, I've had a dedicated Mac for music, and another one for work and/or life.
Because historically, these music companies need more like 1-2 years, not months, to update their shit. (If they do at all; quite a lot of the music plugins and apps never make the transition — whether that is PPC to Intel, 32-bit to 64-bit, Intel to ARM, old kernel extensions to new blehpmpphblewhatev, pre-SIP to SIP, and so on and so on...)
For professional use (music studios, etc) waiting to upgrade isn't that insane — the music software is the main thing, and the OS version is a secondary concern.
iLok is, I think, an accidental monopolist like Adobe Flash in the era just before Steve's famous Thoughts on Flash. Terrible product, content to milk it to the end, no intention or capability of fixing it.
I have a couple iLok USB sticks (that are like $75) and the only purpose of them is so my music shit (from various vendors) keeps working when iLok servers are down.
But the flip side of this is this: I am just a hobbyist with no professional use of this stuff — I just love having all these (simulations/emulations of) retro guitar amps and various effectors and mixing consoles that to my (non-pro, non-audiophile) ear sound indistinguishable from the real thing, and would have cost a couple million dollars back in the 1990s.
But even in my case, the dollar value of this stuff is a lot more than the Mac I run it on. So most of the time, I've had a dedicated Mac for music, and another one for work and/or life.
Because historically, these music companies need more like 1-2 years, not months, to update their shit. (If they do at all; quite a lot of the music plugins and apps never make the transition — whether that is PPC to Intel, 32-bit to 64-bit, Intel to ARM, old kernel extensions to new blehpmpphblewhatev, pre-SIP to SIP, and so on and so on...)
For professional use (music studios, etc) waiting to upgrade isn't that insane — the music software is the main thing, and the OS version is a secondary concern.
(I wish it were otherwise.)