What's REALLY up w/ PT6 OSX and Unity/Soundmaster?

[C Roberts]

Would anyone with accurate information PLEASE chime in on this. I heard second hand from a dealer that Digi has hit a brick wall with Apple on getting PT 6 on OSX to work with Unity and Soundmaster and that the only options is going PC. Is this true? Why?
Are we gonna have to endure another hardware re-do just to get something we have now working all over again. I just don't get why this happens? Many other companies have had great success with upgrading to OSX? Why is Digi having so much trouble? Again any information would be appreciated. As I said this info is second hand to me and I would like to hear from others " in the know" as to it's accuracy.
Thanks

[AvidCS]

We had all hoped to have OSX support for Unity much earlier. Certainly we have not hit a brick wall, but we are more chasing a moving target.

With OSX, Fibre channel communication is handled by the same drivers as SCSI. Anyone transitioning from OS9 to OSX v10.2.x would notice that, while FireWire performance was excellent, general SCSI performance dropped by as much as 30% for all applications, not just Pro Tools. This drop in SCSI performance was even more pronounced in Fibre channel communications.

In developing for both Unity and local storage, we have attempted to optimize our behavior for the shipping version of OSX. At the same time, Apple is continuing to update their SCSI managers with each new release. While these updates do improve general SCSI performance, they often invalidate our existing workarounds, requiring new rounds of development and testing.

We are continuing to work very closely with Apple and ATTO on a daily basis, and believe we are making real progress. However, we are cautious about promising a date for Unity support, simply because we have been so close before and had to pull support at the last minute. Until we do announce support, you can be sure that we are not planning to drop our development efforts for Unity on OSX.

Ideally, we would prefer Pro Tools to be platform-agnostic, favoring neither Mac nor XP, so that our users can decide what works best for them. Unity on XP has been available for some time, the operating system is stable, and the performance exceeds even that of Unity on OS9. We look forward to having the same speed and reliability with Unity on OSX as soon as we can.

DigiCS

[C Roberts]

Thanks for the Update. And Thanks J.C. for the call. Just wanted to know what to expect. I
am a die hard MAC user who is not afraid to use a PC if it's the best tool for the job and so it appears that currently it is. I look forward to the day of true cross platform compatability as do many.
Thanks Again