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.
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.
Every once in a while, public opinion actually gets through to them. It only took months to years of clowning and a viral post for them to finally fix their corner inconsistencies.
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.
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.
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.
Folks that use workstations, with multiple slots for whatever purposes, and now have to chose between migrating to desktop towers with Windows/Enterprise Linux configurations, or have a pile of external boxes connected via thunderbolt spaghetti into Mac Studio.
Apple sells hardware and skims software sales on their platform. They are not particularly interested in moving most of their sales to the software side. They are, first and foremost, a hardware company that sells mobile devices, some peripherals (such as TVs and smart speakers) and, incidentally, computers (which are pretty much the best anyone can buy these days).
I have been using corporate issue Macs for more than a decade now and, while the software isn’t perfect, it’s a pretty good Unix that leaves nothing to be desired as a workstation OS. It’s a bit rough around the edges, with some apps getting closer in feature set to their mobile counterparts (and thus less flexible), but they are still good compared to their Windows and Unix competitors. Apple Music is still a decent media player, and TV is decent for video.
And their terminal is one of the very few that respect double-wide and double-height DEC modes, which work great for scripts.
Not everyone across the globe has the privilege of having corporate issued Macs, hence Windows rules the desktop, when their own wallets are asked upon.
In fact, many companies have laptops pools for macOS devices, mostly used during iDevices projects, only assigned to teams members if they are on such a project.
Or even the workflow of using cross platform frameworks like Flutter, MAUI, React Native and co, with a shared Mac mini for iDevice builds.
Those rough around the edges are unacceptable for a device that costs several month salaries above the competition.
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.
WebGL2 already has a compatibility layer to make it work on macOS. macOS is stuck on the 2010 vintage OpenGL 4.1 which predates even OpenGL ES 3.x on which WebGL2 is based. They use the ANGLE (Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine) from the Android project with a metal based backend.
Which kind of hints towards the fact that they could definitely have supported OpenGL in a way that project like MoltenVK work. The OpenGL standard is frozen in time, last update was in 2017. It's not too late.
The decision not so support modern OpenGL is why so much engineering/3D/CAD/gaming software is suck on the windows platform. There is no true cross-platform graphics standard anymore. WebGPU might be our last hope.
ANGLE is also used by Chrome and Firefox for WebGL2. It includes a translation layer from WebGL2 to Metal.
The decision not to support OpenGL is probably because the API isn’t actually very modern and requires the driver to reconstruct what the user code wants. The decision not to support Vulkan however is most likely a political decision.
> The decision not to support Vulkan however is most likely a political decision.
The only platform where running WebGL on top of Vulkan would make sense is Linux, and on Linux both the GL and Vulkan drivers are in good shape via the MESA project (e.g. there's little incentive to switch from a perfectly fine OpenGL driver to Vulkan for implementing WebGL), especially since the only outlier (NVIDIA) doesn't have all that great 'native' Vulkan support either (IME at least).
The same way neither PlayStation nor XBox support it, and Switch does support it, thanks to Android pedigree von Tegra, but the main API with all the goodies is NVN.
In any case, most game studios don't care, because Render-Hardware-Interface (RHI) is a thing since the home computing revolution.
