Warning, I may officially be an old timer now since I've been around the Avid editing universe since the mid 90's, but I'm very frustrated by the trend towards application managers that seem to be constantly active, constantly looking to connect to the outside world. I grew up in an environment where keeping production machines off the internet was the mandate. I understand times have changed and for some maybe they see the advantage of these application managers.
However, even if I accept that they are being used, I want the ability to shut them off and currently the Avid Application Manager is very hard to deactivate on a Mac. I've been in touch with support and they basically admit they don't have a solution right now. So, the manager loads automatically as soon as I boot up and it sits there trying to connect which it won't be able to do a lot of times because I usually try to keep the editing system disconnected from the internet. There have been some solutions posted by users but I can't get any of them to work.
Avid is not alone in this trend. Other companies like Adobe are also creating hooks into your machine. The innocent point of view is that they simply want to make it easy for you to get updates. The cynical voice in my head says it goes beyond that, making sure the software is licensed validly, gathering system diagnostics, etc. Whatever the case may be, as a long time Avid user I'm hesitating putting the software on a new iMac system which I use for multiple tasks because I don't want to deal with this AAM nonsense.
Avid, please offer a solution for disabling the AAM for those of us that were okay with previous ways of licensing, installing, etc. I don't like complaining, but this affects my day to day use of your software and I'm sure others are frustrated by this as well. So I think it's in best interest of everyone to find a solution. There are those of us that would rather operate free of the internet's talons.