[Lee Blaske]

First of all, I wouldn't be so sure that it would be technically possible to have Mix systems working flawlessly on G5's. Stop and think how OLD that hardware is. It was developed during the era of the Mac 9600. That's pretty ancient compared to the Mac platforms we have now, and a lot of the standards are quite different. The Mix cards had very anemic PCI bus buffering. I don't know if that can be overcome with software. I'll bet Digidesign gave it a good try, and I'll bet they would have done it if they could.

Mix support has already continued for a very long time in computer industry terms. In fact, it's continued longer than any other Mac based product I can remember. I think back on some of the expensive video capture cards that I bought (like the Video Vision and Miro DC-30). Those companies discontinued support for those products a short time after I purchased them.

Playing devil's advocate here, I think Mix owners have to ask what's in it for Digidesign. They are obviously not operating this company as a charity. Software development and testing is very costly, and the meager charge for software upgrades doesn't even things out. Then, there's that big, looming additional issue that is a forbidden topic of discussion on this forum, but greatly limits the revenue produced by Mix systems for Digidesign and their development partners.

I don't think Digidesign is going to react well to threats of jumping ship. They'll do what they can do to try to encourage people to stay onboard by offering a continual string of upgrade deals. Frankly, at this point, I doubt that a lot of long time PT users have the stick-to-it-iveness to change their working habits and invest a lot of time learning a new audio/MIDI application. I think Digidesign is quite safe in this regard, and I think they know it.

Fortunately, Mix systems will continue to operate on older machines, and that hardware is still very plentiful.

Lee Blaske