It’s that time again for your annual ‘Don’t update to the new shiny macOS just yet’ reminder.
OS updates are always exciting! Bringing new features, improved workflows and new value to your products. Unfortunately, OS updates also have a tendency to introduce instabilities for 3rd party hardware and software products.
It is important to us that you continue to enjoy using your Denon DJ products without any downtime. We encourage you to remain on your current OS until a full statement announcing hardware and software compatibility is made.
Until then, we also recommend turning off automatic updates to prevent updating accidentally:
Navigate to System Preferences > Software Update
Uncheck the box labeled Automatically keep my Mac up to date
We appreciate your patience and ensure you’ll be the first to know once Denon DJ products are fully compatible with macOS 11 Big Sur.
This is a good opportunity to also ask the question about newest macbooks from apple with their own CPU’s.
Is there a risk of incompatibility when I buy a new mac in January with their newest cpu onboard?
Are You guys already thinking forward about it?
That is very interesting to know, how You guys will approach this challenge.
In my professional experience, Apple does what they want and then everyone else runs around to become compatible. Apple does not give a cr@p about any third party products normally.
So in a nutshell, what I am saying is, once they release the product, only then Denon can start testing and checking for compatibility issues should they choose to.
Big Sur has been released since summer as Beta and Apple did send out machines to software-developers all to secure that software and drivers should be ready upon release. I put this question up earlier but there where no response. InMusic should as one of the biggest manufacturers of hardware in a industry that uses Apple machines already been on top of this matter. Why is it the same every year?
You’ll see the same warning with other performance-based 3rd Party software manufacturers. You’ll see the same cautions year after year with Serato, Ableton, etc.
I recognize your question at the end is aimed at Denon staff but as a person who also deals with Apple in my professional career, I find myself wanting to comment here too.
It is not a priority in companies that do not solely rely on Apple to dedicate resources to Apple’s fast paced updates. The same resources that are dedicated to bug fixes, feature enhancements and new updates for our products are expected to tackle OS updates.
These resources don’t come to work and decide what to work on that day. There is a development pipeline and schedule that is put in front of the developers by the business. The business should decide what goes in that pipeline to be worked on.
Being Big Sur ready does not sell units; same concept of not having support for other operating systems such as linux and that is simply because the vast majority of the market is not using that OS. In this case, the vast majority of users are not forced to use Big Sur so they are told not to update. During the this time, as Big Sur becomes more commonly used, Denon or other companies will try to fit this task in their schedule pipeline.
To the average consumer this might not make much sense but it is very much common practice in the tech world and business.
The fact of the matter is that in majority of the cases, take all of us forum members for example, there is hardly any people that must absolutely update to Apple’s latest OS right away (and if you do, then it must be for another reason not related to DJing which is the users’ issue to deal with i.e if it’s a work laptop you use to DJ with also).
Just my thoughts because I am dealing with a similar issue in my job introduced by Apple’s iOS 14.
Great write down on how stuff like that works!
Comparing to companies that ship software that isn’t even Catalina-Ready, I think having to wait a little should not be an issue!
Mac OS changes bring some nasty stuff, that are often not predictable, so it is most likely, not just a few minutes of work for the teams.
And as far as I didn‘t find a lot of Info from apple about compatibility from Intel i* to their own M1 CPU, I would predict, that Big Sur is a joke in comparison to what is coming next!
The question is made because my 2015 macbook slowly will need a replacement. It served well for djing, video streaming as media server, live vjing, music making, recording sets, streaming with obs, doing some edits, music library management, and all other stuff not specially dj related. I can still run serato or traktor on it with no issues, but I know that upcoming new updates of some apps will become more Power hungry eventually… so upgrade is needed.
With the current pace of software development at Denon, I guess we are getting green-lighted sometimes around 2022 to update to Big Sur (v11.0) when Apple most likely releases macOS v11.2
Denon is actually moving really fast on their updates compared to others.(except VDJ)
And we also have to remember that Engine Prime is still an infant compared to VDJ and Rekordbox in age.
Yeah right. In August, Denon broke Tidal support by ordering playlist’s tracks by name rather than user-defined track order. In November, this hasn’t been fixed.
Engine Prime still, to this date, want’s to format TimeMachine Backup drives despite countless complaints here in the forum; I reported this issue in April 2019.
Denon is actually faster than the rest of the competition in terms of releasing new hardware. But Denon is terrible at communicating about software releases and releasing them.
Take a look at ALL the requests that is coming in… They have alot on their plate.
At least they actually listen to ideas and implement those that could work.
Maybe it doesnt happen in the speed we would like too, but things are moving forward. I myself have asked for 3 things that to me is essentiel, since 2018… Not implemented yet, but I’m not the only one requesting.
Words we live by in the industry that delivers software to end users. For this reason, these sort of messages will hardly ever see an official response. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
What I have communicated to you guys, I can and will never, say to my customers but it is the truth, and if you wonder why I will never say it to my customers, well…simply because of your exact responses…and here we are back at it again, you can never satisfy everyone.
And as for communication, here is a link to the communication from Denon about this issue:
BigSur_memo
There is no company on the dj market yet to completely support big surr. This things take time.
I seen in the announcement from Native Instruments, that Apple made such a big problem with their new system, that can even cause damage to the hardware. So I believe that support for the new OS will take even longer time than usually.
