When will we see Pro Tools on an iPad? With Apple’s announcement of an iPad Pro with an M1 chip just like the entry-level MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini and now an iMac, it’s only a matter of time before we could it be before we see Pro Tools running on the M1 iPad Pro. We investigate…
It may not be that far fetched. After all, Apple has made no secret about the convergence of the iPadOS and macOS.
iOS And iPadOS Apps Can Already Run Natively on Apple Silicon
During the WWDC 2020 keynote when Apple announced Apple Silicon and Big Sur, Apple's Andreas Wendker Vice President, Tools And Frameworks Engineering demonstrated unmodified iOS apps running on an Apple Silicon Mac, using an iPad chip that Apple supplied with the initial Apple Silicon Developer Kits.
Andreas said that… “iPhone and iPad apps can run on the same Apple Silicon that we are using on our new Macs, they will run natively completely unmodified on the Macs as well”. He went on to demonstrate Monument Valley 2, Fender Play for guitar lessons, the Calm app to relax to, all running natively on an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS Big Sur.
During the WWDC2020 presentation, Apple also told us that from ‘day 1’ iPhone and iPad apps would be available from the Mac App Store and that “they would just work, with no changes from the developer”.
Apple Logic Pro X And Final Cut X Already Run Natively On Apple Silicon
Apple has also made a big thing about the fact that they had rewritten all their apps including Logic Pro X and Final Cut Pro X to run natively on Apple Silicon and demonstrated them during the WWDC 2020 presentation running on an Apple Silicon Mac computer with an Apple A12Z Bionic chip, the chip that was shipping in the iPad Pro tablets at the time. Essentially an iPad chip with 16GB of RAM, not even an M1 chip that Apple has announced for the latest iPad Pro.
A Common Architecture
In the WWDC presentation, Johny Srouji Apple’s Senior Vice President, Hardware Technologies said that there would be “a common architecture across all of our product lines, making it far easier for developers to write and optimise software for the entire Apple ecosystem”.
In an interview with The Independent newspaper Apple’s marketing head Greg ‘Joz’ Joswiak, and its hardware chief John Ternus, following Apple’s announcement of the M1 iMac and M1 iPad Pro, were both at pains to talk about the trajectory for the Mac and the iPad. John Ternus told the independent…
“We don’t think about well, we’re going to limit what this device can do because we don’t want to step on the toes of this [other] one or anything like that. We’re pushing to make the best Mac we can make; we’re pushing to make the best iPad we can make. And people choose.
A lot of people have run both. And they have workflows that span both – some people, for a particular task, prefer one versus the other.
But we’re just going to keep making them better. And we’re not going to get all caught up in, you know, theories around merging or anything like that.”
Joz picked up on this saying…
“We provided that performance even before the need was there if you will,. When you create that capability, that kind of ceiling, developers will use it. Customers will use it. It needs to exist first, right? You can’t have an app that requires more performance than the system’s capable of – then it doesn’t work. So you need to have the system be ahead of the apps and our developers are pretty quick about taking advantage. It isn’t like, it languishes for years.”
In the interview with The Independent when asked the morning after the Apple Event, whether Apple is one of those developers that is planning to take advantage of the extra headroom with its professional app, Joz jokes that he’s “not going to let something like that slip out”.
Joz continued…
“Part of the beauty is just: could you imagine a chip before M1 that you could take out of a desktop and put into an iPad form factor?” says Joz. “This is the same chip, just like you saw in the video, that we could pull out of a Mac and put into an iPad. That just, to me – I’ve been around in this industry for so long – is not something you could have contemplated before.”
John Ternus backs this up by saying…
“The best Apple Silicon that we make goes into has always gone into iPad Pro. And M1 one is the best Apple Silicon that we make”.
Logic Pro X And Final Cut Pro X First?
Back to the iPad Pro, based on all this evidence it is not a big leap to expect macOS apps like Apple’s Logic Pro X and Final Cut Pro X to be able to run on the M1 iPad Pro very soon, even though leaker @LeaksApplePro’s prediction didn’t come to fruition at the Apple Event earlier this week.
That said Greg Joswiak’s denial about “not going to let something like that slip out” could be interpreted as confirmation that this is happening but that he can’t talk about it.
This is happening 💯 https://t.co/sJw7fDLCQL
— LeaksApplePro (@LeaksApplePro) April 21, 2021
And now @LeaksApplePro has reaffirmed his March 4th tweet saying that they are definitely coming…
“This is happening💯
Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are coming to iPad.
Announcement at WWDC.
They will be subscription based.”
Pro Tools Can’t Be Far Behind
After all, the M1 iPad Pro effectively has the same chip as Apple have in the entry-level M1 MacBook Air, M1 MacBook Pro, M1 Mac mini and now the M1 iMac and we have seen how well they run Pro Tools and Studio One via Rosetta 2 and Logic Pro X natively in our series of Power Tests.
Then there is the fact that the new M1 iPad Pro comes with Thunderbolt and USB4 support, which makes it been easier for the iPad Pro to support Thunderbolt as well as USB based audio interfaces.
Yes, Avid are yet to release Pro Tools for Apple Silicon, but with Avid Link and Sibelius already supported to run natively on Apple Silicon and Eucon supported via Rosetta 2, they are making good progress. Avid has made it clear they are hard at work bringing the full product range across to run on Apple Silicon natively. At that point, surely it should be possible to run Pro Tools running natively on an iPad Pro? How’s that for working on the go? When will we see Pro Tools on an iPad? Perhaps sooner than we expected!