txsbaker75

MS has been shoving DirectX on devs for more than a decade despite having serious flaws for at least the first 5 generations. Devs cried for years that OpenGL wasn't sufficient for 'real games' and many petitioned Apple to create something to give them better performance like DirectX (yes, it offered performance benefits even while being buggy). Apple comes out with Metal as serious competition to DirectX and suddenly they're terrible for requiring Metal. That's even despite the fact that OpenGL is already being largely deprecated in favor of Vulkan in an effort modernize it because it's begun to seriously lag behind pretty much everything else in use today. And there's absolutely nothing stopping anyone from developing a way to use OpenGL on top of Metal which is probably what someone in the open source community will do.

I've been advocating for this for some time now. Glad to see it happen. It helps fill the dearth of games on the AppleTV. Valve has made some very astute moves with Steam and I hope they continue to push their cross-platform paradigm. I had contemplated getting a SteamLink, but it's pretty hard to justify yet another box just to stream games, especially when I have the best streaming boxes available already connected with SteelSeries game controllers ready to go. I'm very pleased with my AppleTVs but there are still not very many games available, especially not with controller support. It's pretty sad considering that there are a few outstanding titles already on it that show how impressive games on it can be. Even more odd is that some great games available on the iPhone/iPad are missing entirely from the AppleTV. It probably doesn't help that Apple limited the storage so dramatically, but it's hard to imagine that it's really that difficult to port from iOS to tvOS. My $0.02, as ever.

boltsfan17 said:

ireland said:

Apple should sell an entry level machine at a lower cost. In my neck of the woods, for example, the cheapest ATV is €159 ($194). They should have kept the old model around IMO.

Regarding gaming, they should produce a genuine first party dedicated gaming controller. ‘People who are serious about software should make their own hardware’.

At this point, I don't think Apple should make their own controller. Gaming has been a huge letdown on the ATV4. It drives me nuts when I see Nintendo and old Sega titles being released on the iPhone, but nothing for the ATV. There is so much potential, but it seems like game developers have forgotten about the ATV. 

I've posted about this before. I think it must be two-fold. Apple hasn't provided the proper tools, rules, and/or access for games to thrive, and the game devs aren't seeing enough revenue from AppleTV games to justify pursuing development. I know Apple made a huge mistake when they first released the new AppleTV by requiring games to support the Apple Remote. It was a bad decision and the remote is simply not a good controller for most games. They recanted, but it may have been too late. The App Store is also pretty weak when it comes to searching for games. As for the App devs, there has to be some rationale for them not releasing titles to AppleTV that they're already releasing for iOS. I can't tell you what it is, but I'm sure there's some disincentive at work. It's too widespread. Apple should be actively engaging them because it's a huge missed opportunity IMHO. If nothing else, it would generate $ on the app side, and keep people using the AppleTV for more than Netflix/Hulu/Amazon. FWIW, there are some very cool games on AppleTV now, just not very many of them, and the SteelSeries controllers are fantastic. My $0.02, as ever.

Still not sure why they don't just take the motherboard from the MacBook Pro 13 and build a box around it with a daughterboard or breakout to add the desired connectors, a slot for a 2.5" HDD, and a built-in power supply. That would allow them to keep it updated much easier. They're all about economies of scale, after all, and surely the design team could make it look nice. My $0.02

I guess I'm in the narrow group that actually like the Mac Pro (aka trash can). I have one and it's a very impressive machine. Yes, I wouldn't mind the option to upgrade to Vega graphics, but I'm still impressed that my RAID unit is louder than my computer, even under full load, and I can still crunch loads of data as is without crashing. I've owned and integrated multiple of the older Mac Pros (aka cheese graters) and Mac Servers in various environments. Some here might not remember just what beasts those things were. Yes, they were incredibly powerful and relatively easy to upgrade, but they were also space hogs that could get pretty noisy. The upgrades were also expensive and not nearly as readily available as some would have you believe. Only a very small group of off-the-shelf parts worked with them, and they were generally very expensive. Some unsupported upgrades were possible with hacks like flashing firmware, but that could lead to crashes and kernel panics. It was a mess, and I distinctly remember many complaints about it in the user forums of the day. Oh, and for all those 'pros' that switched platforms in protest, I'm curious to know how many of them are just thrilled to be on Windows 10 running alternative software, or Linux doing the same. How many of them would prefer to return to using macOS? After all, Macs are more than just the hardware. I use all 3 OS platforms regularly, and I far prefer macOS to the others.