tomahawk

fastasleep said:

I'm still confused about this lineup. I don't understand how they're going to market the mid-sized LCD model in comparison to the other two. It appears that it'll have slightly thicker bezels, but what other differentiating factors will there be that separates it from the OLED models to the average consumer? I don't think most people are going to know or care about the difference between LCD and OLED. Plastic body like the 5c?

Might be counting on the fact that there is a large portion of the population that doesn't want their stupid phone to get even bigger.  There is no phone in this lineup that my dad would even consider using and I'll be forced to buy the 5.8" just to have the smaller sized device (and it's slightly bigger than my current 4.7").  It would be nice if they offered more differentiation on screen sizes and came out with a high end phone with a slightly smaller size.

Their designers should be forced to hold a baby and use the phone at the same time for a week or two before releasing a larger screen.  And they have to pay for it every time they drop it...

mjtomlin said:

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.

Two things...

First, Apple hasn't updated OpenGL for a while now. Probably when they starting pushing Metal. So the OpenGL implementation included with iOS and macOS are fairly old, I think it's at 2.1, while the latest is 4.6. So there really is only a limited amount of "cross platform" compatibility for developers.

Second, the entire industry is moving away from OpenGL. There is now a Khronos project, Vulkan, that is meant to replace OpenGL and OpenGL ES. And there is a version that "runs" on top of Apple's Metal called MoltenVk, so if developers must have cross platform compatibility, then they can move to it, instead of Metal.

Being able to move to Metal on new projects is great.  How about the thousands of scientific programs that were written for Linux that can be compiled on macOS because OpenGL is supported.  Many of those types of programs are written, released and never updated again.

It is interesting that at the same time Microsoft is adding Linux support within Windows, Apple is doing something that might eliminate the compatibility they've had for years.  One of the strong selling points for Mac's with OS X in the scientific community has always been they could run their Unix/Linux programs and Microsoft Office at the same time.  Removing OpenGL will break many of those programs and help push the science community to Windows, where they can now run their Unix/Linux programs and Office.

There is no reason Apple couldn't deprecate OpenGL for development but assure users they will continue to support older programs using OpenGL.  Heck, putting a little effort into updating to a newer version and some updates for xQuartz (X11) wouldn't kill them either.  Or announce a path to move OpenGL support to a project that can be installed to provide the support needed for these programs.  Then developers will have an incentive to use Metal, but support for OpenGL would still be available for existing code.

With the new WiFi options can the watch finally join WPA2 enterprise networks like eduroam?

AppleInsider said:

Other than setting up a macOS Server install, there is no way to move a file from macOS to iOS other than using iCloud, Amazon Drive, DropBox, or some other service across the internet, rather than keeping the file on the local area network.

A little misleading here as you can easily use Airdrop to accomplish this and keep the file within your local area network.  It would be nice to see support for connecting to standard file servers added in though.