Please bring the ICON protocol to Apple Silicon

To the team at Avid,

I want to start by saying thank you.

I've been with Avid for close to thirty years. Four Pro Tools Ultimate licences, three ICON consoles, three HDX systems and two HD Native systems. I've built my whole working life around your tools, and I'd do it all again tomorrow.

The last couple of years have felt really good. The support I've had from you lately has been genuinely warm and helpful, actually on my side. This new customer-focused Avid is the Avid I've always hoped to be a part of, and I'm grateful for it. I know I'm not the only one who's felt the change.

So here's why I'm writing. There's a chance here for Avid to make a lot of loyal people very happy, and I wanted to put it in front of you.

The ask is simple. Please bring the ICON control protocol, D-Control and D-Command, to the Apple Silicon version of Pro Tools.

Here's why I think now is the moment.

The ICON is still one of the best control surfaces ever made

Twenty years on, these consoles are still going strong. Anyone who's mixed on one will tell you the same thing. The feel of it, the way it connects you to a session, it still holds up against anything that's come along since. And there's a huge, devoted family of ICON users who reach for these surfaces every day, because nothing has really replaced them.

The catch is that the protocol was never built into the Apple Silicon version, so right now the surfaces only work through Rosetta. With Apple retiring Rosetta, that door is closing. A whole generation of beautiful, still-loved gear is about to go quiet. Not because it stopped being brilliant, but because a bridge was never built.

Why I believe this is good for Avid too

I want to be fair to the business side, because I think it points the same way we do.

For a start, the cost has never been lower. With the development tools available today, porting the protocol and keeping it maintained is a far smaller job than it once was.

It won't take a single console sale away from you. No modern production house is going to skip an S6, or sell theirs, to go chasing a legacy ICON. It's a completely different customer with completely different needs. So there's nothing at risk there.

What it would do is keep a lot of loyal subscriptions alive that are otherwise about to drift away. This is the heart of it. The moment these surfaces stop working, a big group of us loses our main reason to keep our licences ticking over year after year. Turn the protocol back on, and those subscriptions stay.

And I mean this personally. As an ICON user:

• I'd happily chip in towards the development costs to get this ported.
• I'd keep every one of my licences active, every year.
• I'd gladly pay a one-off unlock fee, or a small yearly fee, for the ICON protocol.

I've a feeling thousands of us feel the same. Subscriptions that stay instead of churn. A community that would gladly help fund the work if it came to that. A fair charge for the unlock if you'd like one. All of it lands well on the bottom line, and even bigger on how much your users love you.

And there's a bigger picture

Keeping these consoles alive keeps a mountain of beautifully made, still-capable gear out of landfill. That's a lovely story for Avid to tell, and one this community would be proud to help you tell.

We'd love to do this with you

That's the whole thing. Every way I look at it, it points the same direction. It keeps revenue you'd otherwise lose. It opens fair new revenue if you want it. It keeps wonderful gear out of the bin. And it would mean the world to a group of people who've loved Avid for a very long time.

We're not asking for a favour. We're asking to do something good, together, that makes a lot of people very happy.

So please, Avid. Bring the ICON protocol to Apple Silicon. Let us keep using the tools we love, keep our licences live, and keep being the happy, lifelong customers we want to be.