ElCapitan

cat52 said:

I'm a software dev and push my machines fairly hard and have to say the 2018 Mini is pretty much perfect in every way.  It's powerful, quiet, small, and cheap.  And I 100x prefer using macOS over Linux on the desktop.

So for those thinking Apple is dead, supposedly in Silicon Valley even, I just have to roll my eyes.

For lengthy Xcode compiles (or something else in a VM) the mini is far from quiet. The fan noise gets pretty annoying over time when you listen to it for hours on end. 

Also, the graphics performance makes it completely unsuitable to test anything 3D graphics for real. You can verify that it is working on Intel graphics, but you cannot test real performance that end users may want. 

I don't think you know what pushing a mini hard for dev actually means. 

Bring it today!

To be successful they need to produce for a much wider and diverse (international) audience. For that to happen they need to stick their heads outside the US centric, political correct, California box it is currently stuck in, and discover there is a whole planet out there with cultures, ideas and lifestyles that often will fly right in the Apple corporate face, but still are rich, fascinating, dramatic, often violent, have great love stories and heroism, and have histories centuries longer then the American.

I remember a quote from a US newscast in the 90s where someone said "the only mad cow in America is Oprah Winfrey"  – I think that is widely the feeling about her outside the US. 

elijahg said:

ElCapitan said:

elijahg said:

ElCapitan said:

The rewrite to Metal for cross platform developers is non trivial because the Metal libraries only work with Objective-C or Swift, neither of which are used (if at all) outside dedicated macOS or iOS development. (Yes, IBM has done some work on server side Swift).

In addition, apart from the VR announcement at WWDC 2018, Apple has gone completely silent on the subject. 

Loss of OpenGL, and the lack of a replacement that can work cross platform, will rob the macOS users of a large number of software titles once OpenGL is gone from the platform (macOS 10.16 speculative). 

... but it may end up deprecated. 

It IS deprecated as of macOS 10.14.

If they announce an ARM Mac, there is not a snowball's chance in hell they will have OpenGL support on their own GPUs. (...or use anyone else's GPU for that sake).

Oh I didn't realise it was deprecated already. That's complete madness. As you say above if they remove it then a huge numbers of programs will just stop working. Totally crazy with no foresight to (or ignorance of) the consequences.

It is going to be massacre.

Here are a few 3D content type titles I happen to use: Blender - have said they are not going to port to Metal. DAZ Studio - I can't see they will write a Metal version given the already half hearted macOS support they currently have.  Substance Painter - maybe, but perhaps just maybe given they now are owned by Adobe. Talking about Adobe; don't get me started.

I know of a single person macOS developer for Cheetah 3D who has a really hard struggle porting his application to Metal.

The SecondLife/OpenSim viewers where the developer has not even started on a Metal rewrite for a renderer that is completely proprietary, complex and tuned for dynamic content which Metal does not work particularly good at, as it gains the speed from optimized content known at compile time. The SecondLife/OpenSim content is thrown at the renderer in realtime by users and it not really optimized for anything at all so Metal will struggle (most likely more than OpenGL does is the estimation). 

elijahg said:

ElCapitan said:

The rewrite to Metal for cross platform developers is non trivial because the Metal libraries only work with Objective-C or Swift, neither of which are used (if at all) outside dedicated macOS or iOS development. (Yes, IBM has done some work on server side Swift).

In addition, apart from the VR announcement at WWDC 2018, Apple has gone completely silent on the subject. 

Loss of OpenGL, and the lack of a replacement that can work cross platform, will rob the macOS users of a large number of software titles once OpenGL is gone from the platform (macOS 10.16 speculative). 

... but it may end up deprecated. 

It IS deprecated as of macOS 10.14.

If they announce an ARM Mac, there is not a snowball's chance in hell they will have OpenGL support on their own GPUs. (...or use anyone else's GPU for that sake).