"But by no means to they have the clout to coerce developers into their own bespoke graphics API that doesn't work anywhere else"
To be fair, the overwhelming majority of game shops develop on engines, and leave the engines to deal with the platforms. Unreal Engine, Unity, etc, support Metal, among others.
Not everything that runs on OpenGL is a video game. Tons of applications out there that just won't have the budget to do a rewrite(and even fewer were probably setup with the right architecture if they were depending on OpenGL in the first place).
Indeed, I directly thought of 3d applications like Blender, Maya, etc which use OpenGL.
It's a very weird move to me, even if the software in question will be kept compatible with Apple's Legacy OpenGL, these versions will be worse than their counterparts running on other platforms making use of new shiny OpenGL features.
It's like Apple is saying 'we don't care' to the 3d professional market, also doesn't Photoshop rely on OpenGL these days as well ?
After discontinuing AutoCAD for Mac in 1994 people begged for 18 years to get it back and now Apple says "eh, we didn't want that anyway."
I heard they have a WebAssembly/WebGL version now, betting that'll get wrapped up in a WebView and we can all pretend it's a native program still.
Speaking of WebGL, that's basically OpenGL ES 2.0, but I assume the implementation in WebKit is backed by Metal? What about other browsers like Firefox?
AutoCAD is a dead technology. Architects/Stuctural Engineers/MEP Engineers are moving to BIM platforms (Revit, ArchiCAD, etc)! Product/Automotive/Industrial design and engineering use PLM tools (Catia, SolidWorks, etc). Besides, AutoCAD didn’t/doesn’t need much graphics power at all. AFAIK it never really used OpenGL.
I'm not sure about that. Or maybe Adobe just doesn't care. My 2017 Macbook Pro has horseshit graphical bugs in both Illustrator and Photoshop. I'm exclusively doing all my graphics work on my Windows 10 machine now (even though windows and my Wacom tablet do not play nice together.)
I'm in the same boat, my so called Pro machine the USB-C 2017 MBP has had glitching out completely unusable rendering on the latest version of Illustrator since October 2017. Adobe blame Apple, presumably Apple blame Adobe because neither of them are fixing it.
As if my deteriorating keys on this machine were not bad enough. This wasn't a good WWDC for me. My PC is working great despite being an obscure setup with mismatched GPUs, can't say I understand why the graphic designer workhorse machine MBP is unusable with Illustrator and that is working just fine..
microsoft changed the pen behavior in one of the creators' updates and now the pen buttons behave strangely (randomly dont work in certain applications) as well as the pen being registered as a finger in legacy applications for a while... making windows 7 the only really viable way to use wacom for a professional (speaking as one)
let alone the inability to reconfigure things like n-trig pens to have hover right click/middle click functionality, it's been INCREDIBLY frustrating without any communication from microsoft.
I've got the Intuos Pro from a couple models back. Windows Ink randomly causes pressure sensitivity to drop out (especially since the creators update.) On Windows 8 I never had trouble with the wireless adapter, now I have to run wired. Button clicks don't always register and sometimes will send the wrong input.
Overall it's rough, there are days where it seems better than others - but I'll randomly lose sensitivity and multiple reboots appears to be the only pseudo-consistent means of getting it back.
That being said - It's still way more usable than Photoshop/Illustrator on my Mac.
I miss 15 years ago when I had CS2 + Intuos Pro 2 and everything just worked.
True, but they didn't remove OpenGL, they simply deprecated it (e.g. don't expect any updates to it, new tooling will not be built around it, etc). That shouldn't affect legacy apps.
Yes, and deprecation doesn’t mean a lot on the Mac. Apple often deprecates stuff and still leaves it in. They remove it only when there’s something to be gained.
(eg. linking with the system-provided OpenSSL has been deprecated for years, but AFAIK they still ship it.)
Apple can get away with that on iOS, but they're a lot more conservative with macOS.
To expand on your example, I maintain a legacy app that is stuck in 32-bit land because it relies on the QuickTime framework. QuickTime has been deprecated for seven years, and the transition to 64-bit has been in progress for over a decade, and yet my legacy app runs just fine even under the Mojave beta. There are multiple time bombs lurking in that app, and one of these days I'm going to have to rewrite it from the ground up, but I've been astonished at how long it has lasted.
Apple knows it would be bad karma to make a large number of legacy apps and games suddenly break on the Mac. They're not idiots; they have a perfectly good idea of the scale of mutiny that would ensue. So I'll eat my hat if OpenGL doesn't continue to work for at least the better part of the next decade.
They said in the Platform State of the Union that Mojave will be the last macOS that runs 32bit apps, so QuickTime.framework and your app are running out of time!
True — 10.12 is my recollection as well — but I’ve been bitten so many times by compiling under a new SDK, especially with an older build target, that I do that as a matter of course anyway.
I find it hard to fathom that people think a huge software company like Apple doesn’t have awareness of the impact of its changes or people responsible for compatibility.
If there isn't one already, I'm sure someone will implement OpenGL on top of Metal when it's needed badly enough. At least they're going closer to the hardware, not further away.
Why use Libre Office on a Mac when Pages, Numbers and Keynote are free (as in beer)? I’m going to go out on a limb and make a baseless argument that the Libre Office install base on the Mac is very low. On iOS it’s non-existent.
There is no way that Pages, Numbers and Keynote can open as wide a range of file formats that LibreOffice can. And there are way more features in LibreOffice.
Having used pages and word, please don't tell people to use Pages for everything.
It doesn't have the features you need when you're creating more complex documents. Last time I've used it it didn't even allow you to have different sections which allow you switch between the rotation of pages.
Every game developer I know turns off the metal rendering pipeline and uses the much more stable and refined OpenGL one unless getting every tiny bit of performance needs to be squeezed out.
I’ve witnessed plenty of last minute builds be saved by a Unity game dev on a Mac just flipping their renderer settings.
I don't think it's much of an incentive. According to Valve's hardware surveys roughly 3% of Steam's market is MacOS. Those type of numbers are similar across different distribution platforms that a Unity game dev will target. It'll be hard to nudge it away from low priority with that share.
The other figure to look at is the amount of money spent. If it's similar to the hardware percentage then you're right, if on the other hand, macOS users spend more on games then a rethink is in order.
To be fair, the overwhelming majority of game shops develop on engines, and leave the engines to deal with the platforms. Unreal Engine, Unity, etc, support Metal, among others.