At the bottom of the press release they have links to individual OS pages:
* iOS 27: https://www.apple.com/os/ios/
* iPadOS 27: https://www.apple.com/os/ipados/
* macOS: https://www.apple.com/os/macos/
* watchOS: https://www.apple.com/os/watchos/
* visionOS: https://www.apple.com/os/visionos/
* tvOS 27: no link.
* Overview: https://www.apple.com/os/?version=no-hero
No disrespect to you for posting this, but those iOS/iPadOS/MacOS are almost identical launch pages. Feels like a waste of time even having them be separate.
Poor tvOS :(
I was at WWDC for the Vision Pro launch and asked someone a technical question about tvOS. He said, 'ah, [Jim] could answer that, but he isn't here today'. When I asked if anyone else from tvOS was here the reply was, '[Jim] is the only person on tvOS' and I am pretty sure he was serious.
I’ve heard this kind of thing about Apple fairly regularly (the iTunes Remote app comes to mind). While there are issues to large teams, I feel like there is a middle ground that doesn’t result in a single point of failure. What happens when Jim wins the lottery?
It seems like Apple could very easily turn the AppleTV into a proper game console, but not with only one person on it. I guess it’s still just a “hobby” for them.
> What happens when Jim wins the lottery?
so much better framing than typical truck hit :))
love it
> It seems like Apple could very easily turn the AppleTV into a proper game console
Apple could turn the Mac, iPad or Vision Pro into a proper gaming console, too. It's just not something they are willing to do, no matter how well-positioned they are for it.
I think this is honestly correct strategy.
Gaming is a license game, not a hardware game.
Apple wants you to buy your games through the App Store, so they can take the 30%, which means competing with Steam. Which means getting licensed games on the App Store.
Apple already fought one such license war over music and won. They're currently doing Apple TV as well.
However, for the gaming industry they're complete strangers. Unlike music (which is mostly made on Mac) and TV/Movies (which are often made on Mac, at least partly), gamedev is very much Windows focused.
Pushing for ports and licenses is an uphill battle, and probably not one Apple wants to take on. They have plenty of other profitable ventures.
> Gaming is a license game, not a hardware game.
Gaming is also a software support game.
Especially in the last few years, preservation has been a big topic. Gamers want their purchases to keep working in the future, not being broken by an OS update as it often happens with macOS (compared to Windows)
I think you’re responding to “gaming” and thinking of AAA titles which are flashy and splashy but are a smaller market than mobile games. I guess gp might have been thinking of mobile or casual where Apple does have a significant stake and interest but no appreciable focus.
I'm thinking of gaming as in Steam, including indies, AA and AAA.
Of course Apple is doing perfectly fine for mobile gaming, and is giving more than enough tools to developers to implement mobile games perfectly well.
I am talking about PC gaming, and more specifically modern DXVK/Wine support. There's no need for ports, as the Steam Deck showed.
Apple Silicon GPUs are all capable of supporting Vulkan 1.3 and translating DirectX code. Proton 11 supports ARM/FEX natively, which would make Apple Silicon a first-class citizen if you use Asahi drivers. macOS users will be stuck with Game Porting Toolkit and it's lackluster support; iPad/AppleTV/iPhone users have no options whatsoever, presumably to redirect their attention to the App Store that Apple profits from so handsomely.
This is entirely a misleading point. DXVK, Wine and Proton are full of patches that exist to support individual games.
It is not just a translation layer, as much as a great effort of the open source community to force-port every game in existence to Linux. The effort also includes stuff like ntsync that gives the Linux kernel Windows-y APIs for performance.
I doubt Apple has any interest in any of that. I don't really blame them.
And purely in principle, why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
For casual kids gaming, Apple TV and Apple Arcade is a fantastic combo. It's been plenty enough to keep my kid occupied, using hardware I already owned.
They already have several such deals, such as Resident Evil.
It streams videos. It works. I'd rather they don't mess with it.
However, the guy who decided to put a useless button on the side of the remote that interrupts whatever you're watching, should get fired immediately. It's almost every day I grab the remote and press it by accident, and have to switch back to what I was watching, and resume playback, because Netflix exits out of the stream.
Sadly, Apple TV is the only Hollywood-approved streaming device that isn't a total trash heap.