This still makes no sense at all. There is no reason why Apple can't support their native SDK (Metal) and OpenGL. Microsoft has been doing this for decades with DirectX.
The majority of game developers won't bother with creating Metal versions of their rendering engines. There won't be enough customers to justify it.
Two things...
First, Apple hasn't updated OpenGL for a while now. Probably when they starting pushing Metal. So the OpenGL implementation included with iOS and macOS are fairly old, I think it's at 2.1, while the latest is 4.6. So there really is only a limited amount of "cross platform" compatibility for developers.
Second, the entire industry is moving away from OpenGL. There is now a Khronos project, Vulkan, that is meant to replace OpenGL and OpenGL ES. And there is a version that "runs" on top of Apple's Metal called MoltenVk, so if developers must have cross platform compatibility, then they can move to it, instead of Metal.
You're off on your OpenGL support. They stopped at 4.0.
It is built in obsolescence. Windows will run on 15 year old computers while Mac OS will refuse to run on any Mac built more than six years ago. There is really no technical reason why Mac OS could not run on a 2010 Intel CPU. These are decisions made at the top of the company. Apple does what is best for Apple and not for its customers. The reason developers are not up in arms about Apple dropping OpenGL and OpenCL is that it really happened years ago when Apple stopped updating it. Mac OS is now about five years out of date. When you look at the extremely poor library of AAA games available on the Mac, know that it is Apple's poor hardware features and lack of cross platform software support that is the major reason. Of course people don't buy Macs to play games. Pretty soon people won't buy Macs at all.
Patenty false garbage. I'm currently running the latest macOS on my 2011 -- a seven-year-old system. And it runs very well (I'm a software dev and this is my desktop machine). I have not had the same pleasant experience running Windows on seven-year-old hardware. Have you?
I wouldn’t know; I’ve never had a Windows laptop last that long.
Maybe you should stop buying cheap PC/laptops, and start looking at high quality devices like Thinkpads, HP Elite desktops, or Z-Workstations. They are as good or better than what Apple offers.
Metal on iOS makes perfect sense for all the reasons stated in the article. Metal on Mac OS only makes sense if Mac OS itself is going to be deprecated in the future. This is because the main driving force for improvement in graphics hardware for the past two decades has been games. Gamers have kept the cost of the hardware down to affordable prices and the performance on a steep upwards curve. New SDKs such as Vulkan, DirectX DXR, CUDA and OpenCL are far ahead of Metal. They can even do ray tracing. For Metal, a game developer's only choice is a game kit like Unity or Unreal. Most AAA titles use their own game engine such as EA's Frostbite which do not support the Metal. Productivity software also will not support the Mac. A company I worked for in the past only supported the Mac because it could run the same OpenGL on Mac, Windows and Linux. Without OpenGL you can expect a much shorter list of Mac compatible graphics apps. This is part of Apple's plan to sideline the Mac which they are putting very little development effort into compared to iOS. This is a good business decision but they should be honest about the future prospects of the platform which is being kept on life support until they can come up with a way to develop software natively on iOS.
And OpenGL is not wiped from macOS yet. It's just been officially deprecated after years of neglect. It's still in Mojave.
Sounds like we could maybe get that Metal-compatible GPU driver installed if dosdude can work up a copy of Mojave with the OpenGL renderer reactivated.
Correct -- this is has been accomplished, and my 10-year-old MacBook5,1 running official 10.14 fine (APFS and all) serves as an existence proof.
See the related thread "How to install Mojave on unsupported Macs" from June 26.
It is built in obsolescence. Windows will run on 15 year old computers while Mac OS will refuse to run on any Mac built more than six years ago. There is really no technical reason why Mac OS could not run on a 2010 Intel CPU. These are decisions made at the top of the company. Apple does what is best for Apple and not for its customers. The reason developers are not up in arms about Apple dropping OpenGL and OpenCL is that it really happened years ago when Apple stopped updating it. Mac OS is now about five years out of date. When you look at the extremely poor library of AAA games available on the Mac, know that it is Apple's poor hardware features and lack of cross platform software support that is the major reason. Of course people don't buy Macs to play games. Pretty soon people won't buy Macs at all.
Patenty false garbage. I'm currently running the latest macOS on my 2011 -- a seven-year-old system. And it runs very well (I'm a software dev and this is my desktop machine). I have not had the same pleasant experience running Windows on seven-year-old hardware. Have you?
I wouldn’t know; I’ve never had a Windows laptop last that long.
Maybe you should stop buying cheap PC/laptops, and start looking at high quality devices like Thinkpads, HP Elite desktops, or Z-Workstations. They are as good or better than what Apple offers.
Why would you waste your money on an overpriced Windows laptop built with off the shelf parts? As soon as you break the tape on the box its worth 40% of the overpriced cost of it.
It is built in obsolescence. Windows will run on 15 year old computers while Mac OS will refuse to run on any Mac built more than six years ago. There is really no technical reason why Mac OS could not run on a 2010 Intel CPU. These are decisions made at the top of the company. Apple does what is best for Apple and not for its customers. The reason developers are not up in arms about Apple dropping OpenGL and OpenCL is that it really happened years ago when Apple stopped updating it. Mac OS is now about five years out of date. When you look at the extremely poor library of AAA games available on the Mac, know that it is Apple's poor hardware features and lack of cross platform software support that is the major reason. Of course people don't buy Macs to play games. Pretty soon people won't buy Macs at all.
Patenty false garbage. I'm currently running the latest macOS on my 2011 -- a seven-year-old system. And it runs very well (I'm a software dev and this is my desktop machine). I have not had the same pleasant experience running Windows on seven-year-old hardware. Have you?
I wouldn’t know; I’ve never had a Windows laptop last that long.
Maybe you should stop buying cheap PC/laptops, and start looking at high quality devices like Thinkpads, HP Elite desktops, or Z-Workstations. They are as good or better than what Apple offers.
Why would you waste your money on an overpriced Windows laptop built with off the shelf parts? As soon as you break the tape on the box its worth 40% of the overpriced cost of it.
I don't consider Thinkpads "an overpriced Windows laptop built with off the shelf parts". TP's are one of the best designed notebooks on the market, and even have some advantages over MBP's. Lenovo use the MIL-STD 810G standard to test their notebooks, which includes very high / low temperatures, liquid spills and dust. Even the X1 Carbon, a device as thin as the MBP 13" has keyboard that is spill resistant, has no issues with dust and it's tactile feedback is far better than the MBP. Apple could copy a few things from Lenovo. Here is video of someone doing some tests in an X1 Carbon,
Do you think that a MBP could pasts those tests? I don't think so. Maybe there are more important things than the cost of the device after you break the tape, don't you think?
This still makes no sense at all. There is no reason why Apple can't support their native SDK (Metal) and OpenGL. Microsoft has been doing this for decades with DirectX.
The majority of game developers won't bother with creating Metal versions of their rendering engines. There won't be enough customers to justify it.
No sense? Really? It's beyound your comprehension to see that maintaining two competing technologies has costs? One assumes that you don't use a car but use a carriage that can be drawn by an internal combustion motor or by horse. Gotta keep that backward compatibility...
When 98% of the applications are not being coded to use the low level GL or Metal anyway, but use intermediate toolkits that, as has already been mentionned, have already been or are being ported to Metal, only the hardcoded GL apps like CAD are left and they never bought much Apple hardware anyway.
So yeah, it makes perfect sense for Apple to orient it's ressources to a much faster graphics framework that it controls over it's entire product line from iOS to Macs that can enable new technology like VR rather than be shackled to GL that's been been getting abandoned for Vulkan anyway.
Metal on iOS makes perfect sense for all the reasons stated in the article. Metal on Mac OS only makes sense if Mac OS itself is going to be deprecated in the future. This is because the main driving force for improvement in graphics hardware for the past two decades has been games. Gamers have kept the cost of the hardware down to affordable prices and the performance on a steep upwards curve. New SDKs such as Vulkan, DirectX DXR, CUDA and OpenCL are far ahead of Metal. They can even do ray tracing. For Metal, a game developer's only choice is a game kit like Unity or Unreal. Most AAA titles use their own game engine such as EA's Frostbite which do not support the Metal. Productivity software also will not support the Mac. A company I worked for in the past only supported the Mac because it could run the same OpenGL on Mac, Windows and Linux. Without OpenGL you can expect a much shorter list of Mac compatible graphics apps. This is part of Apple's plan to sideline the Mac which they are putting very little development effort into compared to iOS. This is a good business decision but they should be honest about the future prospects of the platform which is being kept on life support until they can come up with a way to develop software natively on iOS.
All your narration becomes nonsense when you consider that all Macs are actually two-computers-in-one thanks to BootCamp: a PC and a Mac. Do we need an OpenGL-only graphics application? Easy, if a Mac version doesn’t exist then we’ll install the Windows version on the BootCamp partition. Same for games... So who cares? Who cares about the future of OpenGL on the Mac, really?
Besides, if OpenGL has really such an industrial value and if it is really open as its name implies, then the community may continue to develop it for macOS, nothing prevents that, Apple uses common CPUs and GPUs as everyone on the Macs. If you’re an app developer here is the challenge: begin today...
... Without OpenGL you can expect a much shorter list of Mac compatible graphics apps. This is part of Apple's plan to sideline the Mac which they are putting very little development effort into compared to iOS. This is a good business decision but they should be honest about the future prospects of the platform which is being kept on life support until they can come up with a way to develop software natively on iOS.
Yeah, this is my concern as well.
macplusplus said: All your narration becomes nonsense when you consider that all Macs are actually two-computers-in-one thanks to BootCamp: a PC and a Mac. Do we need an OpenGL-only graphics application? Easy, if a Mac version doesn’t exist then we’ll install the Windows version on the BootCamp partition. Same for games... So who cares? Who cares about the future of OpenGL on the Mac, really?
Besides, if OpenGL has really such an industrial value and if it is really open as its name implies, then the community may continue to develop it for macOS, nothing prevents that, Apple uses common CPUs and GPUs as everyone on the Macs. If you’re an app developer here is the challenge: begin today...
Well, except if the rumor mills have any validity, future Macs (if Apple keeps them around) will be going to A-series chips, which means no more BootCamp.
I suppose we can just install OpenGL like some did with Flash once it is dropped? If so, that wouldn't be so bad, as users of higher end apps like that are used to doing such things anyway. But, I'm really not sure what Apple's plans are. I'm pretty sure they don't much care about high-end users of CAD and 3D apps though. They can make more money selling Memojis to rich teenagers.
macplusplus said: All your narration becomes nonsense when you consider that all Macs are actually two-computers-in-one thanks to BootCamp: a PC and a Mac. Do we need an OpenGL-only graphics application? Easy, if a Mac version doesn’t exist then we’ll install the Windows version on the BootCamp partition. Same for games... So who cares? Who cares about the future of OpenGL on the Mac, really?
Besides, if OpenGL has really such an industrial value and if it is really open as its name implies, then the community may continue to develop it for macOS, nothing prevents that, Apple uses common CPUs and GPUs as everyone on the Macs. If you’re an app developer here is the challenge: begin today...
Well, except if the rumor mills have any validity, future Macs (if Apple keeps them around) will be going to A-series chips, which means no more BootCamp.
I suppose we can just install OpenGL like some did with Flash once it is dropped? If so, that wouldn't be so bad, as users of higher end apps like that are used to doing such things anyway. But, I'm really not sure what Apple's plans are. I'm pretty sure they don't much care about high-end users of CAD and 3D apps though. They can make more money selling Memojis to rich teenagers.
This is a problem of future Macs then, not of today's. Today's problem is to develop a previously missing crucial low-level component of the operating system, that is Metal. Everything is high level in this century: high-level Java, high-level Flash, high-level OpenGL, you name it.... What makes creative brains implode is the low-level. If Apple prioritizes developing a crucial low-level component of the operating system over "cross-platform" extravaganza there is nothing wrong with that.
macplusplus said: This is a problem of future Macs then, not of today's. Today's problem is to develop a previously missing crucial low-level component of the operating system, that is Metal. Everything is high level in this century: high-level Java, high-level Flash, high-level OpenGL, you name it.... What makes creative brains implode is the low-level. If Apple prioritizes developing a crucial low-level component of the operating system over "cross-platform" extravaganza there is nothing wrong with that.
Well, except that a lot of developers with few resources (and even some with many) will have to make the decision about whether it is worth their time to develop for some proprietary low-level Apple thing, just to have a Mac version for a diminishing number of their current and potential clients.
Maybe someday iPad Pros will become productivity products and the numbers will be such that the platform gets taken seriously by these kind of products/developers, but I think as things currently stand, it will just reverse a trend that was at one point showing some hope (i.e.: developers deciding to release for the Mac too).
Apple probably doesn't give a rip, as their new target users are more about fashion and emojis and an occasional mobile game for which developers will take the time to go Metal if they can get a couple dollars from several million people. The problem here is more about the apps that sell a few hundred extra copies, where it was worth it to ALSO make a Mac version because it was relatively easy to do.
I am a pro-user who needs open GL to run high-end graphics software (ie. Nuke, Houdini, Maya, Katana etc) I own a lot of Apple gear but not going to throw any more money at a company that doesn't care. Seems they spend most of their time figuring out ways to block older machines from running the yearly updates. so sad...
I think everyone is wrong about what Apple is doing. No, getting rid of OpenGL is not necessary, except...
I think they are doing something very different. First came the eGPU support, then the end of OpenGL, then lots of hiring from Qualcomm in San Diego. I think they are looking at miniturizing the eGPU (which is WAY too big), and they need one graphics library so they aren’t chasing bugs forever...
Apple loves maxims. “No one wears a watch any more.” BOOM! The Apple Watch. “No one plays games on a Mac”. Could we see the Apple iBox game machine?
I think everyone is wrong about what Apple is doing. No, getting rid of OpenGL is not necessary, except...
I think they are doing something very different. First came the eGPU support, then the end of OpenGL, then lots of hiring from Qualcomm in San Diego. I think they are looking at miniturizing the eGPU (which is WAY too big), and they need one graphics library so they aren’t chasing bugs forever...
Apple loves maxims. “No one wears a watch any more.” BOOM! The Apple Watch. “No one plays games on a Mac”. Could we see the Apple iBox game machine?
I think it's more that iOS is the primary platform now, so Metal. But, even if that is the case, it isn't like the rest of the world of apps will just jump to Metal unless/until Apple proves itself for a quite a while. But, I guess we can hope. I don't think it will be an Apple iBox though, as Apple is rather clueless about such things, so if they did, I fear it would just be painful for us to watch.
Comments
See the related thread "How to install Mojave on unsupported Macs" from June 26.
and it runs on 10 years old Mac book Pro fine.
Besides, if OpenGL has really such an industrial value and if it is really open as its name implies, then the community may continue to develop it for macOS, nothing prevents that, Apple uses common CPUs and GPUs as everyone on the Macs. If you’re an app developer here is the challenge: begin today...
Well, except if the rumor mills have any validity, future Macs (if Apple keeps them around) will be going to A-series chips, which means no more BootCamp.
I suppose we can just install OpenGL like some did with Flash once it is dropped? If so, that wouldn't be so bad, as users of higher end apps like that are used to doing such things anyway. But, I'm really not sure what Apple's plans are. I'm pretty sure they don't much care about high-end users of CAD and 3D apps though. They can make more money selling Memojis to rich teenagers.
Maybe someday iPad Pros will become productivity products and the numbers will be such that the platform gets taken seriously by these kind of products/developers, but I think as things currently stand, it will just reverse a trend that was at one point showing some hope (i.e.: developers deciding to release for the Mac too).
Apple probably doesn't give a rip, as their new target users are more about fashion and emojis and an occasional mobile game for which developers will take the time to go Metal if they can get a couple dollars from several million people. The problem here is more about the apps that sell a few hundred extra copies, where it was worth it to ALSO make a Mac version because it was relatively easy to do.
I think they are doing something very different. First came the eGPU support, then the end of OpenGL, then lots of hiring from Qualcomm in San Diego. I think they are looking at miniturizing the eGPU (which is WAY too big), and they need one graphics library so they aren’t chasing bugs forever...
Apple loves maxims. “No one wears a watch any more.” BOOM! The Apple Watch. “No one plays games on a Mac”. Could we see the Apple iBox game machine?