kbeat

At some point, I think you've earned the stuff you stole. Chewing your way through steel reinforced cables? Yeah, keep it.

Thank goodness they're finally killing OpenGL. It had its day, but that day has long passed. No one uses it anymore except on Mac, where Metal is already so much faster and makes much better use of the hardware. Think of Metal like Sony's own APIs for the Playstation. Even though the PS4 quite similar in terms of hardware to the XBox, they don't use DirectX or any such derivative. They have their own custom APIs, which like Metal, allows devs to get right to the hardware without an OpenGL or DirectX middleman. This makes the system more efficient and often more powerful. Apple is absolutely doing the right thing here. It's not about standards, it's about squeezing every possible drop of performance and efficiency out of your hardware.

That said, without a little push, devs can be very, very slow to adapt, as adapting requires time and effort up front. If it can be avoided, they'll avoid it, but this should do the trick. Oh, and to those inclined to panic over such things, if devs and publishers are making money selling their games and apps on macOS, they will continue to do so. If they don't, they won't. This will not have any impact in terms of releasing software. If they're making money, they'll adapt, like devs always do. 

I'm less optimistic about OpenCL, as Metal hasn't yet proven to be as adept as OpenCL at offloading CPU tasks to the GPU. Heck, Adobe already supports both OpenCL and Metal for this very purpose in their apps, and to say OpenCL is faster than Metal is an understatement. It can be massively faster in certain tasks. Apple better make significant improvements to Metal in this area over the life of Mojave if this is to go smoothly. 

alandail said:

How do phone calls work with these?  Are microphones built in like with the AirPods, or do you have to plug in a cable?

Yes.

To clarify, you have both options. There is a microphone built in that works okay for phone calls. If you want better audio quality for calls there is an included cable with microphone that you can plug in. (I'm assuming these work the same as the W1 Solo3's Apple released last year.)

Really odd editorial on AppleInsider. Just below a header for a review proclaiming the new iPad an absolute steal, there is this article suggesting it's not worth the tradeoffs in 2018. It can't really be both. 

Clearly I'm missing something. I'm looking at my mid-2014 Retina MacBook Pro right now at it has speaker grills to the left and right of my keyboard, facing up. Why is AppleInsider calling that a revised design?

Even more fun is reading the forums on the actual dev and seed sites dedicated to authorized early users discussing issues and solutions with the releases. Despite the fact that you should absolutely know what you're doing, and what you're getting into, if you're authorized to be on those forums, you constantly get "that's it, I'm done with Apple/macOS/iOS/Safari/Insert Here forever" after they run into some bug that kills their workflow at the moment. They are positively indignant that such a bug could exist, even though their role in testing the software in the first place is to find and report such bugs.