Dan_Dilger

davgreg said:

So the great unanswered question is will there be a Mac Pro available for me to purchase before January 1, 2020?

On the consumer end of the Mac line I expect to see Apple developed GPUs in the not too distant future. If they ever decide to move the Mac to ARM, that would just about be a requirement. Note that Microsoft is preparing to ship an ARM based Tablet running Windows and this time it is being positioned above the Intel version.

Apple was using PowerVR, and now its own similar TBDR "Apple GPU" in mobile devices primarily because that approach is so much more efficient. It's not clear if there would be an advantage to scaling up its own Ax GPU to try to replace AMD or Intel silicon, even in its own notebooks. Moving from Intel to ARM might make some sense if Intel keeps failing to deliver big advances and its CPU prices remain high. That wouldn't require Apple to also jump to using its own GPU though. Instead, its possible that it could move to an ARM-based Mac that uses a fast third party GPU or two to make up any difference in speed, say, delegating more of the UI experience to the GPU.

Apple is already bring some core Ax functionality to Macs in the form of the T2 chip, and certainly learning from that. And the Afterburner product shows it has plans to tackle specific needs with a custom silicon solution. So it could begin adding more and more of these extra processors to Macs until the Intel CPU is increasingly less important.  

wizard69 said:

Wow another excessively wordy article that fails miserably.  Apple has about a 0% chance of making Metal an industry standard.  A Mac standard yes, industry no.   Vulkan is what the industry is moving to and that has a lot to do with being standardized.    It should be noted that Metal and Vulkan are very similar so supporting Metal is far easier from a Vulkan base.  

These articles are beginning to remind me of  some of the conspiracy videos on YouTube.  You know when the producer throws a bunch of facts at you and then try’s to link everything together to support his vision.   The conclusion though has nothing to do with the facts., rather the facts just obscure a wild ass guess.  Sometimes it isn’t even a guess but a fabrication bring views to a channel.   

One only needs to get in the loop with developers to realize that the only cross platform 3D solution taken seriously these days is Vulkan.  

Perhaps you should write for the Onion? Apple made Metal an industry standard by announcing it, because Apple is the majority of the mobile market. Does something make you think Metal needs to be ported to Windows or something? I don't follow your logic. As the article notes, Metal is Apple's proprietary platform, and it is not finding it hard to line up development support for it. 

By your logic here, CUDA isn't platform because it doesn't run on GPUs from Intel, AMD, Mali, Adreno, etc. That doesn't make any sense. 

And Vulkan has no chance at being more commercially meaningful than Metal. It's some thrown away software that went open because it had no value otherwise. It's like Java on the desktop, or OpenSymbian or VP9. 

The games using Metal are significant. The games that are written to Vulkan to run on Metal are hobbyist play with 2000 era id software. Again, take a look at that disagreement pyramid. You're ripping up a cliche of a Youtube strawman, not addressing anything written in the article. 

ElCapitan said:

And that was the village idiot comment of the day!

Please don't abuse the comments section with insults that do not add anything to the discussion. Aim higher up on the hierarchy of the disagreement.

canukstorm said:

Rajka said:

I'm sorry, but I cannot justify the iMac as a prosumer Mac. I want my Mac to be readily repairable, upgradable and expandable. You know, like they were under Steve Jobs. I don't mind paying a small premium for that as long as the build quality is there, but double retail? Uh, no.

It was under Steve Jobs that the un-upgradeable, un-repairable, and un-expandable iMac was conceived.  It was the first consumer product released under his leadership when he returned to Apple in the late 90's.

Yes, and while under Jobs the white plastic 2006 5G iMac and its Intel replacement tried out a repairable case with user-replaceable everything, that pretty clearly failed because it ended up driving unnecessary replacement of parts. Most people don't know how to troubleshoot or fix things. So under Jobs, the iMac turned into a sleek aluminum case that was minimally accessible and user upgradable. A year after he passed the iMac got thinner, a design that was clearly in the labs when he was alive. 

canukstorm said:

Looks like one of Catalina's big features is off to a rocky start

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-08/apple-s-merged-ipad-mac-apps-leave-developers-uneasy-users-paying-twice

That is the most absurd, ridiculous article Gurman has ever crapped together.