thadec

Appleish said:

Seems overblown, but because of third-party cable and charger fires, we only buy authentic Apple accessories. And only directly from Apple, because everything on Amazon, Ebay, etc. is suspect. We only get non-powered third party accessories.

No, everything on Amazon, eBay etc. is not suspect. Please quit it with the FUD.
1. Anker cables are great. Anker was founded by very good engineers who left Google and built a much better and far more profitable hardware business than Google ever will.
2. Samsung, Lenovo, Cable Matters and Belkin cables are very good.
3. Amazon Basics cables are fine. I have been using them for years, including the 30 pin and lightning cables that I have bought for many an iPad and iPhone. 

Guys, seriously. I know everyone wants to avoid the cables used by the $75 prepaid phone crowd. But seriously, a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold - I don't name these things - costs $1800 and that is actually down from $2000. And a Samsung Galaxy Tab Ultra costs $1500. Android devices have been using USB-C for going on 10 years. Not only that, notebook PCs have been shipping with USB-C chargers. Steam Deck, a gaming console, and its copycats? The same. Even in the Apple ecosystem, MacBooks and iPad Pros have used them for years. The whole "USB-C chargers are used for Android phones and have no quality control!" nonsense was precisely that, pushed by Apple fans who take it upon themselves to defend every. single. corporate. position. that. Apple. takes. Provide tons of free Apple PR even though they aren't being paid by Apple marketing and aren't even running blogs or YouTube sites where their advocacy can be monetized with clicks. It is amazing. 

Third party Apple proprietary cables have always existed and people have always bought them. And there have been PLENTY Of reputable manufacturers of USB-C cables for ages, which iPad customers have been buying. Claims that the iPhone is somehow different and special - or their customers are somehow less able to find good cables than everybody else - are just that.

Marvin said:

danox said:

Apple can do Direct X in their sleep. They haven’t done it because they’ve been busy doing other things but now that’s probably become inevitable. Microsoft by spending $69 billion dollars on Activision shows that they believe in shortcuts and not rolling up their sleeves. I think Apple can do a game engine in their sleep, and they won’t spend more than $3 billion dollars doing it, which by the way is the cost of the largest acquisition Apple has ever made in their history.

Apple has done the equivalent of DirectX with Metal and built an emulator for DirectX.

They could also build a game engine but I would expect them to build off an existing engine than start from scratch. They could build one from the ground up in Swift like a much bigger version of Swift Playgrounds but for cross-platform support, an existing engine has everything they need as well as familiarity with developers. A custom engine would take years to make. Unity is currently valued just under $13b:

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U

They lose a lot of money every year so buying them out would come with billions in ongoing losses in the near-term.

They'd probably be better partnering with one or more game studios. They have some close ties with Hideo Kojima. He chose the Decima engine from Guerilla for Death Stranding, this is the engine used in Horizon Zero Dawn.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decima_(game_engine)

If Sony allowed it, Apple could possibly license that, build a UI around it and allow targeting multiple platforms. If they didn't allow it, CryEngine is a good engine too and has been licensed to Amazon. There's not an immediate need for it, Unity can't afford to lose their business so they are going to backtrack and Unreal is still available, despite the ongoing legal issues.

It does highlight a problem that there are only two viable production-quality engines available to game developers in one of the largest industries in the world and they are both proprietary. It's not easy to solve because fixing it requires a lot of investment with almost no return and the work involved would benefit competitors. Open source engines can have better licenses but they'll never have the resources to compete with a for-profit company with full-time devs.

I think the most sustainable solution is to have a core renderer and deployment system as an open source product. That's the hard part and small enough that it can be handled as an open source product by multiple game studios. The rest of the engine like editor and software libraries can be handled by multiple for-profit companies. There can be multiple editors and libraries (physics, particles, tools etc) that can be done by 3rd parties.

Two things.
1. This world where Sony licenses something to Apple that can be used to create products on XBox and Android devices that compete with Sony and Apple devices isn't going to happen. Nor should it. 
2. Apple is a hardware company. This sort of thing is hilarious. Normally the Apple fandom kicks back, revels in the benefits that being a hardware operation like Apple provides and laughs at the issues that software companies like Microsoft and Google have to put up with that Apple doesn't. Then every once in awhile a software need pops up and then it is like "oh no! Apple needs to fix this with software!" Yeah ... no. I well remember the "iTunes is malware" era when that buggy, rarely updated junk of an app would freeze and at times take down your whole PC. And Apple's experience with Safari was so bad that they just gave up and stopped supporting it on Windows. So you want the company that couldn't even manage a good media app or competitive web browser on Windows to build a cross-platform game engine? That would be used to create massive games - Call of Duty: Warzone 2 is nearly 200 GB - to run on platforms other than macOS or iOS? Pardon me, but what has Apple ever done that makes you think that Apple is even capable of such a thing?

Let me go back to the iTunes example. 
A. Apple didn't even write iTunes. Apple bought SoundJam, renamed it iTunes and made it worse. (Apple had to "request" for SoundJam's creators to cease making it available for those who wanted it.)
B. Media players are simple apps! (Game engines are not)
C. Apple made tons of money off iTunes for Windows! They had the resources and incentive to make it as competitive as possible! (For a game engine, this is not true.)

Yes, this stinks. But ultimately this is a software business problem and not one for Apple to solve. Should Apple contribute to the solution? Maybe. They could write Unity a check to help pay off their debts in return for co-ownership as well as a seat on their board to force them to sell off or ditch their bad acquisitions and prevent them from committing other such nonsense in the future. Or maybe they could write that check to whatever foundation that is responsible for Godot. But I really don't think that they should. This isn't Apple's area of expertise and ultimately isn't their problem. Apple's responsibility is to create a platform that will feature the top games regardless of who makes them or how they are made. With Ax/iOS they have done this. They haven't done this with macOS/Mx granted, but creating a game engine isn't going to change this.

If anyone should step in and help Unity or solve this problem it should be a software company. Start with Google. Android is just as reliant on Unity games as iOS! Hate Google all you want, they are a successful software company for whom multi-platform support has always been an emphasis. If not Google, then Microsoft. Tons of PC and XBox games are Unity, and Microsoft successfully emulated Google's multi-platform strategy after they ditched the Gates/Ballmer regime for Nadella.

Apple should keep their money and attention focused on their Vision Pro headset and try to succeed where Facebook, Valve, Samsung, Sony, Microsoft and Google failed (Google failed with Tango, Cardboard, Daydream and 2 strategies with Glass!). And creating a workstation chip that is capable of being in the same room as this soon-to-be-released monster: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/amd-zen-4-threadripper-pro-debuts-with-96-cores-to-destroy-everything ... and no, no one will care that the M2 Ultra devices will have superior power per watt to Threadripper Pro workstations that will be (more than) twice as fast while costing (less than) half as much.

Hardware (and I am someone who regards operating systems as extensions of the hardware) is Apple's thing and they should stick to it. 

danox said:

Cross platform is fine, but that is secondary in order for Apple to sell their hardware they can’t sit around and wait forever for third parties to do the job and throughout their history in the end, they have to roll up their sleeves and get busy.

Another example where Apple has had to roll up their sleeves and it’s one of the biggest things that they’ve ever done was to open up their own physical Apple stores, which was also met with derision at the time by the so-called experts, and the reason was the same, most of the existing storefronts could care less about showing Apple products in a positive light.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sanfordstein/2021/05/19/apple-store-turns-twenty/?sh=1bd26efb31ac

You are having some sort of mental block here. The question has nothing to do with Apple's capability. Of course Apple is capable of creating their own game engine. What these people are trying to tell you is that Apple creating their own game engine is pointless if nobody uses it. And if it can only be used to create games for the iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV, no one is going to use it. If we were talking about niche enterprise software or perhaps video and photo editing software, fine. But gaming? No one is going to restrict themselves to Apple hardware because the economics don't work. Yes there are 1+ billion iOS devices, but that gaming scene is $5 a pop for "premium" games. IAP schemes are the only way to make money there. Apple Arcade was Apple's plan to address that but it didn't work. You don't hear anything about Apple Arcade anymore. Devs need to be able to put their games on PC and console because those are the only places where you can charge real money for games - $15 for indie, $70 for AAA and the whole range in between - and have a massive potential audience. Yes, the number of Macs in the wild greatly exceeds the 120 million PS4s and 130 million Nintendo Switches. The difference is that every single one of those 250 million PS4 and Switch devices were sold exclusively to game. By contrast only a tiny % of the 28 million Macs that sold in 2022 will ever have a single video game installed on them. 

And yes, there is Android. Can't push this narrative where "the Mac's small number of gaming units when compared to PC and console doesn't matter because of mobile" on one hand and then ignore Android's massive market share in mobile on the other. No matter how many times statistics like "iPhone device owners spend 7 times as much as Android owners on average" get thrown out there, the idea of making a game engine where mobile games is a large part of its strategy without including the largest mobile platform is nuts. Evidence of this? Ask Apple. We have already established that Apple Arcade got no traction. Apple didn't even try to launch Apple Music without making the app available on Android. Even more embarrassing: Apple did try to launch Apple TV+ without Android only to capitulate and put it on Android. They even put it on Android TV when using it to sell more Apple TV 4K devices was a major motivator for their creating the service in the first place. 

Long story short: Apple can create their own game engine just fine. But if it can't be used to make PC, console and - yes - Android games, no one is going to use it. Making it a wasted effort. 

tenthousandthings said:

A spec bump (M1 to M2) for the iPad Air isn't a "new iPad model" -- so this doesn't contradict the likelihood that iMac and iPad Air will both get the M2, via press release, in October.

The iMac jumping directly to M3 never made sense, and contradicted Apple's public statements about every product getting every generation of M silicon.

Gurman pretty much single-handedly engineered the "M3 in October" expectations. I've gotten John Gruber mixed up with Mark Gurman in the past. I think Gruber would be horrified! 

When have the iPad Air and the iPad Pro had the same chip in the past? Didn't the M1 Mac Mini prototype dev kit use the iPad Pro chip that was out at the time? If the 10.9" iPad Air and the 11" iPad Pro have the same chip, who buys the 11" iPad Pro and why?

No new iPads until there are new chips for them. Remember: entry level chips only because of power/thermal/cost considerations. And you can't have the Pro and Air on the same chip. 
The iPad Pro will need to go from the M2 to the M3.
The iPad Air will need to go from the M1 to the M2.
The iPad will need to go from the smartphone chip to the M1 (as will the Apple TV).
As TSMC 3 is a new process, for the time being there is barely going to be enough capacity for the iPhones. Anything else will need to go to the MacBook Air and maybe the 13" MacBook Pro. Also, using 3nm chips on $500 iPads while your $4000 Macs remain on chips made on a 3 year old 5nm node is gauche. Might as well wave the white flag and shart shipping macOS on iPads at that point. 

This is life at the leading edge. AMD won't be able to access TSMC 3 until 2025 because they don't want to get into a bidding war with Qualcomm, MediaTek, Nvidia and Intel (who needs it for their GPUs) over it. Intel? Same. Even though - despite rumors otherwise - their 7nm process actually is working fine, they are limiting capacity for financial reasons in order to save money to build maximum capacity for the 5nm and 3nm processes they are going to use in 2024 and 2025 (going back to using the tick-tock process of standing up nodes makes this possible from a technological standpoint but is WAY more expensive in upfront costs). So they have to cede desktop and workstation superiority to AMD for yet another year.