Sad but not surprising. Apple marked their OpenGL subsystem as deprecated all the way back in 2018 with macOS 10.14 Mojave and iOS 12. By some miracle it has kept working all that time. While I hate it that Apple can just up and declare a widely used cross-platform API 'deprecated,' it's their system, not ours. So, we should not expect them to care or lift a finger if they accidentally break it.
When they break stuff, developers should lift their middle finger in response. That they don’t I think reflects some kind of Stockholm syndrome.
It's more an indictment of everyone else, buy a different computer and you're guaranteed to be buying an objectively weaker computer for the vast majority of work scenarios. And you're paying a comparable price for it too.
It's so bad Apple can just abort M6 Pro and Max and reuse the M5 generation for an extra year because why not, the most powerful alternatives are still playing catch-up with the base M4.
> It's so bad Apple can just abort M6 Pro and Max and reuse the M5 generation for an extra year because why not, the most powerful alternatives are still playing catch-up with the base M4.
The rumor is that Apple decided to put the engineering effort into the M7 series to make a bigger leap.
Engineering resources are finite. Expecting a company to release every version of every chip at every generation is not optimal. Some times it's better to put the development effort into a bigger goal that takes longer.
I wouldn't call that bad. They're being smart about development strategies instead of forcing everything into arbitrary release goals to satsify marketing and shareholders.
That's what I want from companies who development my products. This is a good thing.
Apple's work is cut out for them; M7 and M8 desperately need a better GPU. These SOCs put up fantastically efficient single-core performance, but have some of the worst GPU compute efficiency you can buy. It also needs a better interconnect than RDMA, since Thunderbolt is snail-speed when networking several iGPUs together.
Apple Silicon is a mirror into the Mac's decision paralysis. Apple wants to unify the Mac power users and iPhone casuals onto one silicon backbone, but can't decide who gets the short end of the stick. Tim Cook especially couldn't figure out how to ship a Mac Pro while retaining "ecosystem" level control over academic and prosumer customers. Professionals and researchers had a stack they wanted to use, and Apple didn't support it.
Ternus will probably try to pivot Apple Silicon towards professionals, but he'll need to make software concessions to enter the true ARM HPC market. Ironically, that may entail Apple's rapprochement with Khronos to get the industry onboard with a CUDA stack alternative. Even a basic "inference hardware" GPGPU standard would put Apple Silicon back on the map for professional applications it has otherwise sat-out.
> Ternus will probably try to pivot Apple Silicon towards professionals
The Mac Studio is on par with the best gear out there for similar pricing. What kind of professional are we talking about here?
The professionals who use multiple gpus or outboard gear etc. Professionals used to love filling up the old Apple towers. Im guessing a MacOS workstation with several PCIE SSD cards and several GPU cards would be a welcome system for say somebody working on VFX on Marvel movie, and need to keep rendering things in the background without slowing down their workflow.
Professionals that see "rackmount" and don't stop at a one-unit rack. Industry-scale customers, not prosumer.
I don't think he intends to make a DGX Pod out of Macs, but the Studio is barely scalable. If we still had Mac Pro PCIe, then at least you could use that for interconnect. Thunderbolt RDMA is such a low pittance that Apple is basically only competing against novelty hardware like the DGX Spark.
[dead]
And do what? They make money selling products to apple users. They probably already sell to PC if they are interested in it. Not so much stockholm syndrome, but some sort of modern sharecropper development system for sure.
As long as people keep buying them, devs have no choice but to adapt
Devs always have a choice, but almost always choose to make more money. Nobody is putting a gun to anyone's head forcing them to develop for macOS.
The other mainstream platform is Windows. Apple only needs to beat Microsoft.
And many do abandon Apple.
How to do that exactly ?
It's more nuanced and the official deprecation status doesn't mean much. sandbox-exec has been deprecated since 2016, but obviously Apple can't afford to break it (Chrome and basically all sandboxing solutions rely on it).
It’s not really “some miracle” as they clearly had some incentive for it to work - it just runs through Metal on the ARM series now. Someone had to spend the time to get that together.
Selling overpriced decides to billions of people and somehow still nobody is available at Apple to spend time on this. No promotions for quality I guess.
In practice the best way to get an OpenGL-ish API is WebGL2. I don’t think Apple would dare to break that.
Yes, this is the real continuation of that. I still don't agree with the deprecation, and hope the support will be continued.