Since the last post got closed for comments before I could reply, I figured I'd start another thread because this is still very much relevant.
I am appalled at the ridiculous crawl-speed pace of the new OS compatibility updates. These updates become available for software developers MONTHS ahead of release date, with a yearly release cycle, so there really aren't any surprises as to when the new OS updates come out for mac. And yet, year after year, we must wait for sometimes MONTHS for full compatibility with new operating systems, and I'm here to call BS on Pioneer's response to this in the last thread.
They claim that previously, their developers were using the betas to speed up compatibility, but then Apple had made "one tiny change" (their words) to the audio engine, and all those months of work apparently were gone, and they were "back to square one" (again, their words).
As a software engineer in the Apple ecosystem myself (iOS), that is nothing short of an excuse for their poor support. While I am not saying I know everything about what their code does and how it functions, I know for a fact that "one tiny change" will not wipe out months of work, and bring them "back to square one".
In fact, this past year, I had to implement a new iOS feature, so I worked with iOS14 Beta 1 through the final "golden master" release. I am well aware that throughout the beta process, APIs change, functionality changes, and code you wrote from the previous beta may not work 100% with the new one. But it is NOT "square one". At the ABSOLUTE WORST, you lose 30% of your work. Even more annoying is they're trying to make it seem like it was that "one little change" that ruined all the work, but I can tell you, even without knowing your codebase, that is not how software works. It's not like your engineers HAD to scrap everything they did for compatibility, and LITERALLY go back to starting over.
Even in the worst case scenario, you have one or two developers testing compatibility from Beta 1, they fix things as new betas come up, and when it comes time to release the final version of the OS, if you have some breaking change that happens, it's not the end of the world. At that point, you may have to go back and fix whatever changes happened between the last beta and the final release, but it's not going to be an entire rewrite, and hopefully would take no more than a few weeks to figure out/fix, not the multi-month BS you put your (highly) paying customers through currently.
This interaction just proved to me that either
1) Pioneer engineers are lazy
2) Pioneer hires engineers who don't know what they're doing
3) Could easily be some combination of 1 and 2
And I don't say this because I don't like the products, you make excellent hardware, but seriously, as it currently stands, your software department is WEAK AF!
Arthur,
As you aren't involved in the planning and engineering process at Pioneer DJ, and I'm not at liberty to discuss them with you here, I'll thank you for your comments and feedback and encourage you to consider that this is a much larger process than you may believe.
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