geirnoklebye

Not doomed, but it would sure as heck help their customers if they released hardware equivalent to or better than i7 configurations not being able to run Mojave. 

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

I have not found any WWDC sessions on moving to Metal for OpenCL developers. I wonder why that is?

Because you did not look good enough, or maybe only wanted to make a doom-ish posting?

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/604/

There has been multiple such sessions in earlier WWDC conferences too. 

What these developers don't factor in is that a rewrite to Metal makes the road to iOS devices very short for their games. Of course many of the same developers are under the impression that iOS devices are not to even be considered for game titles in that their graphics performance is very low.

The real situation is by the time they have done their port, yet another iteration of iOS devices are in the market with ever increasing performance both on the device itself, but also on the big screen. So the upside is only increasing - primarily in the iOS device market, but you sort of get the Mac for free as part of the package.

 Now, Apple has not exactly been very helpful in promoting graphics performance on their Macs with only up till recently underperforming mobile GPUs even in the desktop configurations, where the lack of will to make space for sufficient cooling and inability to upgrade GPUs have added little encouragement.

 As one of the developers stated, the rather short 1 year future horizon WWDC presents to developers is often a deterrent for developers to start complicated rewrites.

The pity is that the i7 Mac Minis they start to drop off cannot be replaced with equally capable hardware. (unless you are willing to replace them with very expensive 2012 models off-of eBay or some other source.)

tmay said:

geirnoklebye said:

tmay said:

Let MS have that.

With that attitude Apple would have been toast in the 90-ties. It was not what we fought for; to let MS have it. 

Show me the data that demonstrated the viability of the product.

The fact of the matter is that when Steve Jobs returned, he axed a number of products; that's why Apple survived.

 
The MS onslaught on Apple was ongoing while Steve was away, and to a large extent sorted by the time Steve returned to Apple.  Steve only got the pleasure of executing an already prepared stab to Bill Gates that was mostly hidden from the public view. At the same time Steve saved Microsoft from being split by the DOJ. The stab was set in motion when it was detected Microsoft had stolen the QuickTime code for use in Video for Windows. 

What Steve did was to axe the licensing program and some other activities that in many ways were as misguided as the ones Tim Cook & Co are on to now.  His most important decision was to rewrite Mac OS based on Nextstep, and launch the resulting Mac OS X, which is the base of all current Apple products.