kbee

georgie01 said:

It doesn’t mean anyone needs to like Metal, but complaining Apple is anti-consumer because of it is rather absurd.

Oh, and btw, I have yet to see an app based on Qt that doesn’t have a sucky UI/UX. It’s a framework for developers who either don’t have the resources to produce a proper UI for different platforms or who lack taste or understanding. That’s not a good example to be using to support your point.

It doesn't matter ho you feel about Qt UIs. Qt was just an example and it is strong in the embedded world.
Apple isn't Anti-Consumer, it is Anti-Developer. MacOS was always great because of "just works". Science and research are closely tight to Open Standards and Apple is dropping OpenGL/never implementing Vulkan because Apple doesn't want to implement all the functionality on their custom silicon.

In a world that is more and more cloud driven open standards matter. macOS has always been a impressive platform for rapid prototyping but I never will implement a Metal shader for a prototype when an OpenGL/Vulkan shader is needed. Metal may be nice but it is a proprietary technology for a niche market - who wants to buy a 18000$ iMac Pro that isn't even capable of displaying a simple OpenGL/WebGL application using the latest OpenGL standard?
 

Moving away from OpenGL (and not moving to Vulkan) is one of Apples biggest mistakes:
- OpenGL and it's successor Vulkan are industry standards, Metal is a proprietary Apple technology (the way Microsoft would have done it).
- Lots of technologies are built on top of industry standards, all software developers developing cross platform applications rely on industry standards.
- Embedded systems ship with OpenGL (with Vulkan being not available right now on most platforms).
- Famous frameworks like Qt are build on top of OpenGL and offer a little bit of Vulkan.
- Famous tools like Blender are built on top of OpenGL and don't care about Metal.
- Not a single Linux platform supports something like Metal or DirecxtX (to name both proprietary technologies in a single sentence).
- The Web is build on top of standards - ever heard of WebGL? There won't be a WebMetal or WebDirectX.

Game engines:
Yeah! Game engines support Metal! But if we have a closer look, a lot of this game engines use frameworks like MoltenVK to map their Vulkan calls to Metal.
Shame on you Apple! There is a good and open standard and Apple doesn't support it!

Apple custom GPU:
So why is Apple moving in the direction of Metal? Cause Apple is building it's own custom GPU and so Apple doesn't have to implement OpenGL or Vulkan functionalities! Makes sense from Apples point of view but it maybe breaks compatibility with Vulkan/OpenGL in the future.
No one knows if the next Vulkan version will be supported on the next Apple GPU version cause Apple just doesn't care.

What Apple should have done is replacing OpenGL with Vulkan. A lot of developers including myself are turning away from Apple. Slow GPU, bad hardware, bad keyboards, everything soldered and glued, no ports, not replaceable SSD/RAM, no powerhorse Mac Pro - and the best no more OpenGL/Vulkan support in the future.

Goodby Apple

P.S.
This was my first post in 12 years Appleinsider. It was always fun to read the articles but in the past Appleinsider articles read like Apple press releases.