Hey There, and Happy 10.6!
In what I would say is a shocking turn of events, today Logic Pro sees its 2nd major update of 2020.
Released back in May, the blockbuster 10.5 update arrived only 6 short months ago. Before 10.5, Logic Pro’s last major update was back in 2018.
But if you’ve been paying attention, the news from Apple HQ has been nothing short of seismic.
First, Apple announced it will be replacing Intel processors in Macs for their own Apple Silicon. Now Mac will finally enjoy the fluidity and power already living inside iPhones, iPads, and Watches.
Then, this past Tuesday Apple announced the first 3 Silicon-powered Macs.
Not only that, but today’s release of macOS Big Sur brings the feel of iOS to Mac. Now, finally, Mac and iOS devices will be living on the same processors and ecosystem.
And today’s 10.6 update is part of that transition to Silicon and Big Sur.
Logic Pro comes to us with a shiny, updated logo. Optimized for Apple Silicon, and some other interesting updates.
While 10.4 and 10.5 delivered massive advancements to Logic Pro, 10.6 is all about the details.
But thanks to an update in both Logic Pro and Logic Remote, your iOS device is now even more awesome. Because Logic’s Step Sequencer is now fully accessible with Logic Remote.
This means you can now enjoy a tactile beat-making experience using your iOS device.
Couple that with:
- Full support for all Novation Launchpads (rotation no longer required to use with Live Loops)
- A new selection of Keyboard patches in the Logic Library
- A new drag-and-drop zone in the track headers for Sampler
- New Drum Machine Designer Tutorial Template
And plenty of other workflow enhancements and bug fixes. It appears the team at Apple is developing Logic Pro faster than ever before 🙂
Check out today’s video for all the news on today’s 10.6 update!
This is nice and all, but with a large assortment of third party plugins it is this kind of crap that I now have to check and re-check from these other companies to see if Logic Pro X 10.6 breaks compatibility.
When 1.5 arrived it certainly had issues, much of which was due to Catalina, but if there are even more issues this entire transition is just adding one more layer of sourness to my interests in LPX.
And as a NeXT/Apple Engineering alum you could say I’m pissed off they didn’t jump to Zen 3 architecture and continued down x86, especially with the AMD+XiLinx merger and all the advanced technologies about to enter into Zen processors starting with 4 that would have given us musicians far more than my former colleagues will with the ARM architecture and its ceiling on low power that will need to be scrapped very soon or it will become a serious problem for them.
ARM systems targeted the embedded space and are supreme in there–iPhone/iPad/AppleTV/iPod Touch and now that they are entering the full laptop [they released nice consumption boxes the other day, but nothing for full fledged music production or engineering computation, etc], desktop and workstation classes they have to move into a much higher power curve and well this is going to be painful over the next two years. Coding ARM inside a VM is one thing. Optimizing your audio/video/graphics code and more with specific vector operations for each architecture takes resources and time. And most of these companies have very little resources to do so.
It’s why Melodyne introduced 5.1 update with Rosetta 2 support only.
It’s why iZotope has a wait and see and already listing EOL plugins
Same for Native Instruments–more hardware obsoleted
On and on.
Sooner rather than later LPX will require Big Sur minimum and that means good bye to a lot of quality equipment or a move to Windows–which I despise–to keep that investment paying off.
I truly wish Apple would do what they once did and worked far more closely with third party OEMs and certified their solutions before dropping updates on products that don’t bother to list whether or not your expensive plugins will or will not work.
As of now, LPX 10.6 requires OS X 10.15 or newer. I have a feeling this or one more version of LPX will be available for x86 and then everyone is left to either embrace an underpowered M series solution or move to Windows and just download Windows plugins available already for their 3rd party plugins and just deal with a less elegant solution like Pro Tools.
Don’t get me wrong, I love LPX, but with having an Ensemble by Apogee co-dependent upon Apple alone I really don’t want to have to sell that and go another Thunderbolt based route and use Pro Tools.
^ Appreciate some of those comments Marc – think this is interesting – we have all seen Apple take this route before..granted the same iOS ecosystem was not in place…but they do not really have or did not have any great focus on CPU development at that time and had a lack of scale… I think back in the day there was a huge sigh of relief when they came back to iNTEL..now here we go again…maybe I will stay happily stranded on Mohave 10.14 and watch the fallout…hmm…Catalina shyness…and now its a direct upgrade to “Big Sur”…not sure any comments appreciated…don’t want to have to rescript stranded non subscription Apps …lol nightmare…times ahead?
The figures sound impressive: “up to 3.5x faster CPU performance, up to 6x faster GPU performance, and 15x faster machine learning. Up to 20 hours battery life – double that of previous MacBook Pro when watching a video.”
“Logic Pro can have 3x as many instruments.”
To me, this sounds like they have some leeway, but I can be wrong.
Aloha Chris
Great Logic Pro X os10.6 information I have a older macbook pro using LPx os10.4.4 never did upgrade to os10.5. Yesterday I bought a macbook pro 13″ Apple Silicon and will be using it with newer LPx os10.6 upgade, should I try to upgrade the older Macbk pro before getting the newer AS macbook pro 13? Don’t have many projects on the older macbook but I want to move the older projects to the newer macbook 13″.
thank you for your help,
Joseph