tomahawk

McJobs said:

I'm so sick of the Tim Cook era, where every product redesign comes with a substantial price increase over previous model. When Steve was there, products got better at the same price points (e.g. MBP--->unibody MBP), or even were less expensive at the same time (e.g. polycarbonate iMac--->aluminum iMac).

Why wouldn't a new device, with a larger screen, and likely a true "Pro" version of the Pro, cost more? It's going to have a more expensive screen, likely larger battery and potentially more powerful CPU/GPU combos.  It should cost more...  Even if it has the same config as the "better" 15" (8-core, 16GB and 512GB SSD) it would only be ~$200 more than the 15".

And Jobs raised prices too.  Look at the Mac mini. Started at $499, raised to $599 in 2006, and raised again to $699 in 2010.

clarker99 said:

In Canada, the release notes talk about new data transfer option.

That's for the 12.4 release (and is included in those release notes everywhere). It's much more unusual for Apple to release security updates for older versions of the OS (which is what this article is talking about).

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?