You’re so right. Thank you.
Testing your software products with early preview versions of a new operating system is very useful to detect major issues. Steinberg does perform such testing, of course.
Minor issues, though, will crop up even in later preview versions, as the OS manufacturer is constantly tweaking the new operating system’s behaviour.
Also, not all of a new operating system’s known issues are solved by its manufacturer with the first official release version.
I would imagine that it is not easy to decide which is more harming in the long run:
Recommending to upgrade to a new operating system, while there are still unresolved issues, or recommending to refrain from upgrading, even though you might disappoint users.
I agree that transparent communication is a good thing, and helps to create understanding for tough decision making.
Best,
Dirk
Hi Dirk,
I concur 
This is the first statement that I’ve seen from Steinberg that mentions any testing prior to the OSX public release - in fact one of your colleagues specifically said that was not the case, so thanks for clarifying.
I totally understand the predicament that an OS upgrade can put you in, but as you say, transparent communication is a good thing. The thing that didn’t sit well for me and perhaps others (discounting the fanboys) was Steinberg’s apparently casual approach to the whole issue, and not for the first time, regrettably.
Bluntly, the impression formed - perhaps unfairly, was that Steinberg had done nothing prior to release, were not exactly rushing to find a solution, and treating its customers like mushrooms…
Thanks for the reply and good luck sorting things.
any update? Can we get an estimated date to have a compatible release?
Thanks
They’ll assemble the project leads in a month or so to form a committee on the matter, which will present its suggestions so that an expert team can start preparing a roadmap for that.
what a short and easy process, why to not involve NASA?.. forget Cubase, will step to other better maintained, supported and cheap products.
WOW!! What a terrible and unhelpful thread for the most part! Too many assumptions and not enough info to help others move forward.
Regardless of a developers upgrade/update process or policy, my stance is to never trust an upgrade. Too many computer setups, too many variations.
For those who do everything on a single machine, can I suggest you partition your hard-drive and run a dual boot system. E.g. Mavericks on one and e.g. El Capitan on the other. Super critical if you make your living on it.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac-software/run-el-capitan-on-hard-drive-yosemite-on-mac-3533305/
BACKUP YOUR DRIVE first of course using Time Machine or other and follow the steps on the link above. This will end the need for conversations like these.
Be nice people. I have my gripes with Steinberg on occasion, mostly to do with their communication, but rarely their intent. They are dedicated and hard working people
NO! THEY ARE NOT!
Developer releases are for developers, NOT for testing at all. They are to give app developers an idea of what is going into the new OS ‘soup mix’ so they can get a heads start on what to put some attention to in regards to what they can start taking advantage of in their app design.
Testing doesn’t care about the future. They are about making sure the past won’t came back to bite in the !!!. They need stable OSs to test against, otherwise anything already tested may be changed under them, making any effort up until then a waste of time and money.
Between the Developer and Consumer previews of Win8, there were over 100,00 changes. No third-party product team is even going to think about testing as-they-go with that type of change onslaught. It is reasonable to think that similar sorts of change numbers would be happening between OSX previews.
There is a reason why enterprises can take up to two years to implement an OS upgrade. It is all the evaluation, regression testing and app remediation required.
DAWs are probably the most complex prosumer software around. Each one will have differences in architecture, with many parts inherited over many years. Thus they will not all have the same issues with a new OS version.
I just find it disturbing how people who complain about spending dollar amounts under thousands have opinions on how businesses making millions should run their business. It seems obvious that companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Steinberg, and every manufacturer of anything relating to compatibility with any other software or OS would do whatever they can to make it work as soon as possible right? To think that a developer would sit on something just to lose money or credibility would just be asinine to say the least.
Obviously there are issues that the average guy is not privy to.
I for one, wait until they figure it out before upgrading. It just makes sense…
I think it comes from thinking that big enterprises are just scaled up versions of consumer thinking, and thus acting with the same impetuousness or obsessions.
However, the same thinking also doesn’t seem to countenance that timescales may be scaled up as well, nor that some things may need to be done differently when thousands or millions are dependent upon what you do.
Of course, big businesses are run by people, but logistical practicalities often work to temper their excesses, though those same practicalities can often lead to issues not being addressed in the timeframes customers may want.
Pro Tools is working, NI software is working, Logic Pro is (of course) working… and because my audio card is a MOTU I’m also trying Digital Performer… it’s working fine. Steinberg software nobody knows when I’ll be able to run it again (w/o rollbacks and VM/drive partitioning etc). Those are the FACTS, not opinions & philosophy.
Since I’m working for a Software Company and by many years, I can say that this stupid point of view can be described as not technical and unaware of the development, difficulties etc… unfortunately it’s always reflecting the realty at the end! If all the rest of the world is ok, you can say whatever but it’s still a your problem and you have not fixed it at the right time.
One option would be to create 2 partitions on your HD, a new one for 10.10 and (the existing HD) for 10.11.1. Run Cubase on 10.10 (of course). You may actually find that you end up with a better (faster and more stable) install since Cubase won’t be competing with all the other ‘junk’ you might normally use (Dropbox, OneDrive, etc…etc…)
You obviously have to have a big enough HD but I think that’s what I’m going to do.
Another option would be to use VMware Fusion to create an OS 10.10 on an Virtual Machine with Cubase on it… (although you’d need a pretty beefy Mac to run Cubase this way).
When the dust has settled and Steinberg sort it all out, just run the updates and delete your 2nd partition (making sure you copy any valuable data off it first!!)
Just my two-penneth.
I take it you’re not a software developer? (I am). You have a confused notion of what testers and developers do. When you have a new beta developer release out for an OS, and an existing program, testers and QA engineers should (and do) test whether the program works with the new OS, create bug reports for any issues found, etc.
You seem to think that testing is only about making sure existing versions of a software work in the stable version of an OS. That’s not the case in any major software company. Some smaller shops might do it that way merely out of lack of available resources, but most competent small shops will too test their products with the developer betas to fix whatever needs to be fixed.
That’s how all those companies are able to launch updates to fit a new OS on day one or within a couple of weeks.
The number of changes doesn’t matter at all, since only the ones affecting your product are important. The total number of changes is across all subsystems and programs, including ones not touched by your product at all. E.g. thousands of them would be to the revamped Web engine, etc – and have nothing to with Cubase.
And of course there’s always the GM, released weeks before the new OS, that has few, and usually NONE at all, differences to the final version.
The reason SOME enterprises take “up to two years” to implement an OS upgrade is because enterprises are slow moving behemoths, with tons of legacy crappy code, even stuff depending on IE6, Active X and what have you.
This naive assumption on the competence and benevolence of companies falls down when one has experience with the software industry, especially the professional one, where many companies are known for horrible release practices, disrespect for their users, complacence, money-milking, etc.
Steinberg, especially in early 00’s, was notorious for leaving known bugs unclosed for years on end, and then coming up with a new paid version to fix them (not unlike finally getting Retina support in another 8.5 or 9 paid release, 5 years after the feature has been introduced).
Not to mention companies like Quark and other such bad apples – with them the treatment of customers and releases was so bad that they managed to lose their #1 leading position in their industry, and most of their users, in just a few years.
I think that Steinberg is better post-Yamaha in those regards, but still this lack of transparency (and results) nearly 2 months after the GM is troubling.
For people who don’t have other needs to update to El Capitan of course it’s OK, they can always use older versions, especially if they only work in music.
Until then, this of course makes anybody buying a new macbook/iMac --that comes with El Capitan – to use it with Cubase to have to manually reinstall a previous version of the OS on it, perhaps one without the latest drivers for the screen and peripherals too.
Your last two posts seem to paint opposite pictures of the software industry.
The first painted them as fastidious and enthusiastic, but the latter as slack a-holes. So which is it?
It is more that most are somewhere in between. Certainly in my work with rolling out a testing methodology to a major retail store chain, and improving the governance of projects to ensure testing and documentation were adequately funded at a major bank, testing was the poor relation in project budgets, and it was an uphill battle to get people onboard.
At the retail chain, I did a spreadsheet that could do ad-hoc reports directly from the Mercury testing database, and the test script steps numbers ranged from a couple up to 140+, when they should have a mean of 10-12 with a narrow standard deviation, so testing practice is still relatively immature in places.
Of course a software house will run up their stuff on a new OS preview to see where the land lies, but these later OSs have been going through several changes in functionality at the 11th hour, unlike previous ones, where the candidate release was fairly final more than a month before the official release to OEMs. With that sort of short timeframe, it doesn’t leave much time to fix anything that may be broken, especially if it requires a fix from the OS maker, as it did for Win 10 for Cubase to get the go ahead.
To a certain extent, it is a crap-shoot as to whether one makes it through without a holdup, as even if one’s program is ‘perfect’, it only takes something to change incorrectly on the OS side at the final release, and it may adversely affect yours, but the competition gets the Ok. Again, it all comes down to how its done under the hood in yours. And unless there is a complete rewrite from the ground up for each OS version, there is a tonne of legacy code that has managed to dodge bullets for years! And Cubase is the most full featured DAW out there, so has more possible failure vectors.
Oh, and I do do software, and am presently up to my neck in PHP, javascript, regular expressions, XSL and some VBA, which can be a pain if I lose track of which format test condition syntax I am supposed to be using at any particular instant.
With respect, you guys are wandering down a blind alley.
Regardless of what Steinberg have / haven’t done what they are ‘guilty’ of is woeful communication.
To wit, we STILL don’t know what the hell is going on.
Obviously both. Some companies are fastidious and enthusiastic, others as slack a-holes only in it for the money. And there are even degrees in between.
An issue is that Steinberg insinuated that they don’t do tests at all before release, even with the GM. And of course we’re now a month past the official release too – actually we’re already at 10.11.1 stable.
Hear you bro…
Yeah, and to think I left Logic (which I’ve used for 5-6 years, after I’ve started out mid-nineties with Cubase until up to a couple of SX releases), because Apple was too opaque and uncertain on issues and future developments.
This time, I have to blame Apple. I’ve not seen a release of OSX break this many things - Cubase, Office 2016 and many others have been bricked. I’m not in a position to say no to these upgrades because they bring security updates. So as soon as 10.11.1 came out and tested solid with Office 2016, my company forces it on us. I don’t use the Cubase for my work, so not a huge deal.
But I’m late now on an important volunteer/non-profit job because Cubase won’t work. I will be firing up my previous Macbook and going through the install process this weekend just so I can finish the project.
Steinberg can’t continue like this much longer - people are getting new Macs every day and those macs come with El Capitan. That means every new Mac buyer will not be able to use Cubase.
Ed - it’s been nearly a week. Nothing new?
They may not really know either, as they might be waiting on Apple for some feedback.
There is the Win 10 precedent, where some symptoms of the problems were mentioned, but after a few weeks, some details were released about the problem being with MCSS, at a depth that only MS could know about from actually doing the investigation and discovering what was actually going on. And the problem was on their side.
MS is a little more transparent these days, and their audio team lead engages with the public too, as evidenced by their handling of an SD card issue recently, where the problem was purely on the device maker for using reserved bit fields in the file directory, but MS still implemented an extra check, and blogged about progress on the way, as well as on a GearSlutz thread. That still took a few weeks to come to fruition, just because some things take the time they take.
Now, if this one requires some investigation on Apple’s end, we have no idea how transparent they will really be to SB, let alone us.
I suppose it comes down to whether you just want to be told any old stuff when there is nothing to tell, or wait until something of consequence comes forth.