Avid, what happened with Mojave?

Ok, so it doesn’t surprise anyone that Avid is slow to support new operating systems. If you are part of the recording industry you typically just resign yourself to not updating your OS unless you feel like gambling your lively-hood hoping everything works after an update. I have been a Mac and Protools user since 2006, and I never updated my first Mac Pro. Ever. I can still turn it on and its running Mac OS Tiger.

So what happened with Mohave support?

It is now Mid April , a few months before Apple will announce their next OS at WWDC and still the official answer from Avid is

“macOS Mojave (10.14) is not supported with Pro Tools at this time.” Avid states that they have found serious CPU performance issues when using lower buffer sizes, and while i appreciate the caution, 10 months is just too long. Interestingly enough the 2019.5 version of Protools is rumored to have support for Mojave, along with a number of improvements.

Software in 2019 has become iterative, even Avid has moved to a new versioning standard that shows clearly what version you are running, and when it was released. I get the sense that Avid may have had the rug pulled from under them as many of the underpinnings of Protools are likely a decade old. I really hope that this past year has been spent re-writing and modernizing the worlds most popular DAW so that we can, once and for all, stop dismissing the Upgrade to Mojave notifications.

I would love to know the story behind why it took so long to certify Mojave. Let’s hope the next version Mac OS (Joshua Tree, is my prediction) doesn’t encounter the same hurdles we saw in 2018.