Any official news on MacOS Big Sur compatibility? Thanks.
I tried macOS Big Sur (beta 7-10 and RC1) together with Dorico 3.5, experiencing no special issues.
Everything is the same to what Dorico behaves on macOS Catalina.
However, these are only my experience on intel mac models.
Big slur should not be a problem. Apple Silicon however… that is entire different story and the whole ecosystem will need to migrate.
I’ve been running Dorico without issue on Big Sur for some time. However, it’s generally advisable to hold off upgrading a new OS at least until .1 has been released unless you absolutely have to. That’s definitely true for BS.
Early reports about the Intel emulation on Apple Silicon Macs are generally very impressive, however.
Unfortunately at the time of writing Dorico does not run under Rosetta 2, at least on the developer hardware and software that has been available to us. I’m not hopeful that the production machines or the GM build of Big Sur will change that. We will provide more information about the compatibility of Dorico and other Steinberg products on Apple Silicon-powered Macs as and when the information becomes available.
Is that a new feature in Dorico 4?! 
When I bought my first Intel Mac in 2006, the authorisation software for Finale 2005 (which was PPC code) didn’t run in emulation, so I couldn’t authorise the installation out of demo mode.
I had to stump up for Finale 2007, which was a Universal Intel/PPC binary; and of course shortly after I bought it, Apple issued an update for Tiger which fixed the emulation problem.
No comparisons or inferences should be drawn from this amusing story.
Except that those who learn nothing from history are condemned to repeat it? 
A write-up on this over at Scoring Notes: Music notation software, macOS Big Sur, and Apple Silicon M1 Macs [updated] - Scoring Notes
Yes, we’ve got everything we know at this time, not just about Dorico but the other major desktop notation products as well, and will continue to keep that post updated.
Broadly speaking, Big Sur does not appear to affect any of these applications much one way or the other, at least if you’re already running Catalina.
When it comes to the new M1 Apple Silicon Macs, however, as Daniel has already said here, consistent with what Steinberg corporate has provided to us, “As it stands we need to inform you, our loyal customer base, that neither our software nor our hardware products are currently supporting new Apple Silicon computers (running Big Sur with or without Rosetta 2) until further notice.”
Thanks
…and I hope that migration to Big Sur will not mean abandoning some older OS. At least, being the last version running Adobe CS6 in a reasonably reliable way, not High Sierra!
Paolo
The next major version of Dorico (sometime in 2021) will very likely require macOS 10.15 Catalina as the minimum macOS operating system version.
Mojave is the last version that can run CS6. But all things come to an end: that software was release over 8 years ago.
Switch to Affinity for a modern and much cheaper alternative to Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign (if that’s the issue).
I can’t have answers about how all the CS6 apps I use work under Mojave. My tests were not totally satisfactory with Acrobat Pro (but I might not have done all was needed to make it work).
CS6 is old, but is still sort of a standard in my working environment. And since I only use part of the apps, I’m not too happy at the idea of paying the full amount required for a yearly subscription to the entire package. In particular in these times.
In the meantime…
… I’m following with great interest the development of this alternative suite. That is not yet read, and probably not even near acceptance. To be more precise: Photo is already good for my works. Designer is not (for example, yesterday I had to adapt some text to an object in perspective, and had to launch Illustrator). And it can’t open DXF files, nor seems going to be able to do it soon.
Publisher is still very far from being a replacement of InDesign. Missing a book feature, a better way of managing linked illustrations, long tables, conditional text, compatibility with translation tools, and some small but very important features, I don’t expect it to be ready before three of four years.
Then, assuming books will still be a requirement, I will have to convince the rest of the team to switch to a new and different set of tools, for which the personnel has to be retrained. I’ve started promoting it, but at the moment APub only offers me a blunt weapon.
So – let’s try with a High Sierra virtual machine under Catalina!
Paolo
I run Mountain Lion in a Parallels VM, exactly to run CS6, Filemaker, and other elderly software. It works perfectly well, even on my 2014 MBP with only 4-cores and 16 GB RAM to share.
Hey, Daniel. Have you folks encountered any issue specifically happens between Dorico 3.5 and macOS Big Sur running on intel Macs?
This question is just due to my curiosity, as I have found no issue with such combination.
No, we’ve encountered no specific problems with the current version of Dorico on Big Sur to date.
I have a question/thought that kept me up last night, after reading this thread… it is very OFF Topic, but I figured I would ask anyway.
From my rudimentary understanding of programming (having done some programming 20+ years ago using Turbo Pascal and Q basic, and trying to learn Swift in the last 3-4 years) I am perplexed by the statement “Dorico will not run on Apple Silicon”. If I write software and compile it, is that not dependent on the OS to make things work? Albeit, I never wrote anything complex. Everything I did was very surface level programming. But in what I have read/learned/experienced, I never wrote any code that actually touches directly into the processor computing, and am not even sure how I would do such things. Does Dorico/Cubase/etc. actually bypass the OS and work directly with processor? I am highly confused how software cannot work on Apple Silicon but does work on Big Sur? Can anyone provide an easy to understand answer for me?
Robby