techconc

melgross said:

It’s interesting that Apple chose to save a greater percentage of power than they did to increase performance. It’s a choice. Next year they may decide to go the other way.

Apple’s decision makes a lot of sense when you think about sustained performance. Anandtech’s review shows the A12 based phones (like many Android devices) struggle with that. Short bursts of peak performance are fine for bragging rights on short benchmarks, but higher sustained performance brings real usable gains.

It makes you wonder who would be stupid enough to use Google's services. They are such a slimy company and that's not likely to change as their business model requires them to be this way.

jmulchino said:

Yes, a surprising article with some muddled logic (“locker room talk”? Huh?). And the tone is a bit dismissive of Apple’s recent troubles with the i9 processor. (“Non-engineer YouTubers”) Example: In another story published by AI, Apple actually worked with the “non-engineer” to apparently resolve the issue. 

Most AI readers don’t really care about Samsung, Microsoft, etc. offerings, so why the paranoia? Is it to stifle legitimate criticism by AI readers on Apple? Methinks so. 

And lastly, where is the updated Mac Mini? Cook promised and update. “It’s in our future” Remember. Which future?

For starters, I think we can look at the Macbook i9 controversy now in hindsight seeing as though it has been resolved. An issue was reported and it was resolved rather quickly and trivially with a software update. How much of a big deal do you think we should make of this? Was a product recall required? No? Then what's your point? Also, I'm fairly certain you don't speak for "most AI readers". For that matter, if you weren't interested in the article, why did you read it? Sure, Daniel's articles involve a fair amount of Apple cheer leading, but calling out other dopes in the media like those who write for the Verge sits well with me. Especially when these articles have verifiable supporting data.

rogifan_new said:

Where is Counterpoint Research getting their data from and why should we trust it? The only data I trust is what Apple provides on its earnings calls.

Agreed. It's fine to take claims like this from analysts like Counterpoint Research as a discussion point, but they should not be treated as fact. They are not factual. They are estimates. When actuals from earnings calls are announced, they never correct their claims or even adjust their models which are at times proven wrong.

tylersdad said:

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.

As Mike mentioned, all of the major game engines already have been updated to support Metal. Apple made that point very clear when they debutted Meal years ago. Could Apple continue to support OpenGL, start to support Vulcan, etc? Yes, they could. However, it would be a waste of resources. Right now, the only benefit of continuing to support OpenGL is not to break old applications that have not been updated and ported to Metal. It has already been 4 years now since Metal came out. The writing was on the wall. Apple will likely keep OpenGL in the current deprecated state for another release or two of the OS. After that, I would expect it will be gone. The benefits are that all programs that are running on your machine will be much better optimized. At some point, it's time to flush out the stale garbage that hasn't been updated in years. All of the major players are on board. Not just games, but major apps from Adobe, etc. In the end, I believe this is a good thing for the platform overall.