I think I definitely misspoke here - I really didn't mean the devs so much as the companies that employ them. I know full well how difficult such a transition could be. Native Instruments has a ton of resources, and you'd think at the very least their most recent "flagship" synth Massive X would have seen an update by now.. which definitely points to organizational cruft more than anything. Most of the plugins I use that are created by smaller teams have already been updated.
The fact remains though that a loooot of producers use Macbook Pros, and I'm assuming many will be upgrading to M1s within the next couple years. I'm genuinely curious when the pressures will actually force these large organizations to take the transition seriously.
This is why I am very hopeful for the future of CLAP. It will give all developers a common format to target and test that can be wrapped in VST2/3/AU/AAX relatively easy. Since it has an ABI vs. and API interface, it is not subject to the vagaries of any one company's proprietary idea of how plugins will work. This will also make porting to new architectures easier.
VST2 used to be the standard development and testing target, which was then wrapped to other formats. But all of the developer workflows built around it are now at risk because of Steinberg's asshattery. I know for a fact that this has delayed a number of plugin releases, as developers have to put time into refactoring their code around a new standard target. Thank God for u-He and Bitwig leading the way here. I've tested the Surge XT CLAP build in Bitwig and it just works.
The fact remains though that a loooot of producers use Macbook Pros, and I'm assuming many will be upgrading to M1s within the next couple years. I'm genuinely curious when the pressures will actually force these large organizations to take the transition seriously.