auxio

darkvader said:

designr said:

M68000 said:

Actually, it could be said that wearing a computer on the face may look dumb,  it could even make people  look anti social.  

This guy gets it.

Yep. 

While we may see a few truly antisocial nerd types wearing these around in public, this is never going to be a phone, watch, or even tablet.  Most people who get these will use them only at home where they can hide their shame from the world.  This is not a sparkly thing that celebrities are going to be showing off unless they're being paid a lot to do it. 

Why does it have to be something you walk around in public with to be successful? How many people carry their television around with them in public? Yet most households own at least one television.

That's where I really see this taking off once the price comes down: replacing televisions and monitors. Consider all of the small apartments in major cities around the world. They don't have space for a living room with a big screen TV. With the vision pro, they can have the equivalent of one. Same goes for having a computer with a big monitor on a desk: not necessary anymore.

avon b7 said:

One of Apple's biggest strategic errors was never offering HFS and HFS+ support for other platforms.

That brought headache after headache back in the day, and the need to purchase third party solutions. 

Not only in cross platform environments but also for anyone with occasional needs to read and write to a native formatted Mac drive. 

Now, in the age of networked and cloud storage it is less of an issue but, wow, back then it was horrible. 

Right, because Microsoft was always so open with supporting their technologies on other platforms back then.

melgross said:

Hopefully, finally, this will help. But it’s still a matter of getting enough Mac users to buy them. Most Mac users I’ve known over the years are not real game players. At least, not these heavy games. So it will still be work convincing a market that may not inherently be suited to this game market. Good luck.

The way I see it, there are two main categories of gamers: casual and enthusiasts.

Casual gamers, if they really care beyond just killing time with free games, tend to buy a console or handheld gaming system because you just turn it on and go. That's where Nintendo is king: simplicity. Apple doesn't have a dedicated gaming device (the closest would be the Apple TV, but that still requires extra cost/work to setup for games) so they don't really compete in this market.

Enthusiasts want a gaming system they can tweak and upgrade to get the best performance and play the latest, cutting edge games (e.g. pop in a new GPU to get hardware ray tracing). Apple moving in the direction of computers which aren't customizable at all means they don't compete in this market either.

The only gamers Apple is getting are the ones who are happy with free games on the App Store. Which is actually quite a big market, but Apple only incidentally benefits from it because people bought an iPhone for other reasons and just happen to game on it. That and some people who already own an Apple TV and decide to try gaming on it (again, incidental). None of Apple's hardware actually targets the gaming market specifically, and as you stated, that's been the case ever since the beginning of Apple.

danox said:

jblongz said:

How are people making high-end games for iOS/MacOS without tools like Unreal Engine or Unity?  I've read some introductory documents about Metal and it seems so complex just for that one area of gave development.   Anyone know that the Apple pipeline really looks like?

A list of game engines, you don’t need to use Unreal Engine or Unity, they just happen to be two of the best (most used).

(There are also many other support programs that run with or alongside of the various game engines)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines

It must be said Apple got a late start into this end of the computer market, game engines have evolved into areas of the market far beyond just playing games, Unreal Engine is just that Unreal, some of the things that it is able to do is on the cutting edge of modern computer graphics, Sweeney Todd is definitely a mad genius……..

Most of the recent advances in CG are essentially ways to hardware accelerate concepts which have been around since the 1960s/70s (e.g. hardware ray tracing). As Alan Kay put it, "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware". Just need economies of scale to bring the manufacturing costs down. GPUs being able to perform double-duty for machine learning has certainly aided in that.

jblongz said:

How are people making high-end games for iOS/MacOS without tools like Unreal Engine or Unity?  I've read some introductory documents about Metal and it seems so complex just for that one area of gave development.   Anyone know that the Apple pipeline really looks like?

Computer graphics is definitely one of the more complex areas of programming. I remember first trying to learn it (and now I'll be dating myself) from Michael Abrash's articles on the Quake engine back in the late 1990s, and having a tough time wrapping my head around it. I eventually learned it from the CG bible, where it's presented more formally and without the complexity of clever optimizations.

Anyways, once you wrap your head around the concepts and how GPUs work, Metal is no different from other modern GPU rendering architectures like Vulkan. I actually find MSL to be much easier to use than GLSL and other shader languages. And Apple's rendering pipeline is much easier to debug problems with than DirectX (at least, when I used it about 10 years ago). But yes, if you're only used to a prepackaged 3D engine like Unreal or Unity, the internals of how they work (using DirectX/Vulkan/Metal) can certainly be daunting.