elijahg

macxpress said:

Apple is only 1.5 releases into its new silicon and they're already approaching what NVIDIA an ATI can do with their high-end cards

They aren't remotely close to what Nvidia and AMD (ATI is long gone) are doing with their high end cards. Not even close. They're streets ahead with efficiency, and what they've managed to cram on a SoC is incredible, but it is not high-end performance. They were hauled over the coals for their misleading "relative performance" M1 GPU comparison.

macxpress said:

I'd like to see what M2 Pro/Max/Ultra/Extreme is, and even the new M3. Before, Apple didn't seem interested in designing products to use the higher end NVIDIA/ATI chips that would make a Mac decent for gaming. 

Well part of the reason for that is they fell out with ATI (at the time) and then had a childish spat with Nvidia. The Intel Macs from about 2014 onwards had crappy AMD graphics, which ran hot and performed like a dog. I have a 2019 i9 iMac with a Radeon Pro Vega 48. It was the best GPU Apple installed at the time, and was one of the best AMD GPUs, but Nvidia's GPUs were still in a different league in both efficiency and performance, and they did a much better job of writing the graphics drivers than Apple does for the AMD GPUs. Also, AMD GPUs have always been roasting hot. 

Oh and Apple is being so twattish toward Nvidia that they are shafting their own customers again, by refusing to sign the drivers Nvidia is still releasing (or was) for Nvidia GPUs in Macs. So they won't run and Macs with Nvidia cards were stuck on old drivers.

macxpress said:

Hopefully M2 and M3 improve on the already impressive GPU gains Apple has seen and long with Metal 3 improvements, AAA gaming studios will be more on board with developing Mac releases in the future.

I certainly would love to see Apple take more action on gaming. Its a great market, one that will be very tough for them to gain traction in, but perhaps they could get some of it. I would love to get rid of my PC. It gets so hot and its like a big space heater. 

As I said above, it doesn't matter what Apple does with Metal because no big studio uses it. Apple needs to support Vulkan to get any semblance of parity with Windows gaming.

Beats said:

Sounds like they’re 10-16 years behind. Metal 3 is great but if no one wants to use it, who cares?

Exactly this... There are essentially no big game developers writing their engines in Metal, it's nigh-on irrelevant to 99% of the gaming industry. Pissing about with game centre that is used by 3 people is not going to fix the cause of the Mac gaming problem. Doesn't matter what fancy new features Apple adds because anything that might actually use those features is running everything in Vulkan anyway, with MoltenVK translating it into Metal; causing a performance hit over and above the already dismal level of optimisation devs do for Mac games - causing a vicious circle of less Mac gamers -> less games -> less optimisation -> bad performance -> less mac gamers. Macs are way too small a market for developers to spend vast quantities of cash rewriting their game engine in Metal - and this is 100% Apple's fault for being anti-gaming since pretty much day 1. I imagine they hate the fact that most of the App Store revenue comes from games.

The only AAA games that end up on MacOS are ones that use the Unreal or Unity engines, which do support Metal. And the only reason for support is it is literally a zero cost tickbox. But Apple's spat with Epic is unlikely to be enthusing Epic into pouring resources into UE on Mac, so I wouldn't be that surprised if anti-Mac Cook kicked Mac users in the balls again by goading Epic into dropping Mac support because Cook wants his already solid gold pockets lined further. But that is a different matter.

Apple would do better to abandon Metal - or at least officially support Vulkan. If they did so, the number of Mac games would explode overnight. When OpenGL was newer, the number of games that used it on Windows and Mac was growing, but it became stale (especially so on macOS as Apple refused to maintain a remotely current version) so then devs started dropping Mac support and now almost no AAA games are released on Mac. Unfortunately Apple's so stubborn they always have do things their own way, even if its to the detriment of developers, their platforms, customers, and ultimately themselves, so this is unlikely to improve anytime soon. 

spheric said:

Mail merge!? 

It took them A DECADE to reinstate this? 

It used to be that you could just drag a contact group directly from Address Book and drop it into an address field in any Pages or Numbers document, and - presto! - it would auto-generate a mailing to all of those recipients, including the proper salutation. 

No, I'm not imagining this — they removed the feature (along with super easy trackpad-based resize and rotate) back when they feature-synced iOS and Mac versions of iWork. 

So cool that they finally re-implement this essential functionality, years after it has almost entirely ceased to be useful, as paper mailing lists have long died for anything except weddings and funerals… 

None of the iWork apps really recovered after that feature-obliteration. Even after the dumbing-down there wasn't feature parity, there were still aspects that only worked on Mac (contents pages for example) so it really got dumbed down for nothing. It's a shame because Pages and Keynote make things look great, but there are still things missing now that were in Pages '09 - and it's such a hassle to do so many things that are a couple of clicks in MS Office.

I wouldn't be surprised iWork it was rewritten in some early version of Catalyst as a test case, since it was officially released a few years after the dumbening. It also meant the iOS version wouldn't be inferior to the Mac version, which wouldn't have exactly reinforced Apple's "post-PC" iPad can do anything a PC (or Mac) can marketing at the time. 

avon b7 said:

One of Apple's biggest problems has always been commitment to projects and communication so it is good to see them giving a public reply.

It's about time though that they began making communication with pro users a priority in their pro software approach.

An open letter should never have been necessary. Nor the headaches caused by file format and missing features in the move to FCPX. That was a huge disaster for many. 

Apple has a habit of being rather "courageous" in the pro space when that is the last thing people who have highly optimised workflows tuned over many years want. When Apple abandoned the original FCP for FCPX there was uproar because half the features were missing and none of the plugins worked. Many, many places abandoned it for Avid or Premiere (notably the BBC made a wholesale switch). A similar thing happened way back in 2002 with Shake. It was the industry standard for SFX. Apple bought it,  then left it to wither and die. Professionals need to know what's going on so they can plan. No one wants to spend $10k on a program (nor hardware) that has no future. Apple's secrecy is pretty pointless these days anyway since everything gets leaked. So much for Cook's "doubling down" on secrecy.

neverindoubt said:

JWSC said:

With Bay Area traffic being so bad, I almost sympathize with those who don't want to resume their commute.  But it's the job they signed up for.  If management wants them back then that's what they'll need to do.  I'm sure many other companies would be happy to acquire the talents of those who wish to remain working from home.  Maybe they can find new jobs, which better align with their desires.

My only warning is that if you want to move up the ranks, you'll need to show your face in the office.  You may not like it.  But that's the reality.

I think it's less about not wanting to make the drive, or even being COVID worried.

I think it's about people who've left the area entirely and still want to be paid Silicon Valley salaries while they live in East Overshoe, ID.

There will be other companies that will pay SV salaries and not care where the employee does their work from. Which results in Apple losing talented and highly sought after engineers to competitors, because of Apple's ageing upper management's ideals of a 1990's workplace. COVID showed what could be done remotely, many younger companies stuck with it and stuffier ones have not. There are areas where in-person collaboration is essential, but for people writing code, generally not.