281–290 of 466 posts
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Contrast with ~1.5 billion (!) smartphone sales per year.
such figures wont last forever once smartphones are sufficiently mature and there is no performance difference from one model to the next.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Contrast with ~1.5 billion (!) smartphone sales per year.
such figures wont last forever once smartphones are sufficiently mature and there is no performance difference from one model to the next.
But I expect cheaper devices to take more share, since the "high-end" won't give you much benefits over them. My 120 EUR Xiaomi already offers amazing cost performance compared to most other Androids.
To me this signals that the Second Moribundity of Apple is nigh. The First Moribundity was the period in the 1990s when Apple was coasting on the DTP and Photoshop advantage over Windows they had, reducing the features of their desktops and not innovating. Schindler, a smart but ineffective leader, was replaced by Gil Amelio, a star in his prior field but unable to get Apple headed in the right direction. It took Job…
Everyone is coasting in the desktop / laptop market. Refresh cycles are like 5-10 years on PCs now, and it’s not clear tablets even have a refresh cycle. You can’t get growth on PC hardware anymore, not even if you’re Apple. So it goes into maintenance mode. Nobody even really sells desktop PCs anymore except custom gaming rigs and low-power kiosk boxes. Apple is all about mobile phones, the Apple Watch and air pods…
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Already there: https://moltengl.com/moltenvk/ "MoltenVK is a runtime library that maps Vulkan to Apple's Metal graphics framework on iOS and macOS."
But molten is for Vulkan (ie: not OpenGL) - and not 100% of Vulkan, AFAIK.
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Approximate yearly sales of desktop PCs worldwide (all kinds) are 200 million per year... I can't find 5 year refresh cycles on any HP, Dell, etc. desktops or laptops. They tend to refresh in line with corporate cycles, i.e. 18 month to 3 years, from what I see.
Contrast with ~1.5 billion (!) smartphone sales per year.
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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…
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 brow…
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PUBG Mobile is one of the best game I have played in a long time. And it doesn't cost me a penny. Nor do I have to pay to win. ( Actually I may have to upgrade my phone to play better ) But not every game are gambling. Fortnite seems to be doing great. And that shouldn't be a pay to win game.
PUBG was ported from desktop. It originally started out as an ARMA 2 mod, was turned into PUBG, and only much later ported over to mobile. It's a perfect example of the kind of game that can come out of the desktop gaming community. You don't get games like PUBG, Minecraft, Starcraft, Terraria, Civ, Kerbal, and so on without desktop gaming. The games that grow out of the app store ecosystem are games like Candy Crush…
Game Engine Choices would become the old day of OpenGL vs DirectX. No one sane would write their own game from scratch.
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Apple must truly hate gaming, or suffer from a serious case of Not Invented Here with their Metal stuff. As if any serious gaming studio would target Metal which doesn't run on Windows. In fact, they couldn't get their act together, keep with current versions, and as a result titles like Elite Dangerous were being shut down anyway. Reason: OpenGL stuck on an old version without support of compute shaders. https://for…
To be fair, most games today are built using Unity3D, Unreal Engine etc, which all support Metal already. Hardly anyone writes their own game engines these days, and if they do they probably have the resources to support Metal. Overall still a bummer though.
On PC: Maybe by number of games, but not by the number of players.
(I count Fortnite as an outlier because it's technically not built on a third-party engine)
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such figures wont last forever once smartphones are sufficiently mature and there is no performance difference from one model to the next.
The main reason to buy a new phone these days surely is "the old one broke". Being with us all the time. The planned obsolence - unreplaceable battery, glued screen, glassback etc mean phones break all the time. PCs stand still, even laptops tend be mostly stationary. No wonder my work laptop is now 6 years old and I feel no urge to request upgrade.
Don't forget planned insecurity two years after release through unpatched software vulnerabilities.