241–250 of 466 posts
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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.
This is a problem that is entirely of Apple's own doing. Microsoft could not care less about OpenGL on Windows. However, it works just fine. You know why? As soon as you install your video card drivers, your OpenGL implementation is no longer from Microsoft. It comes from AMD, NVidia or Intel, with all needed optimizations for their hardware. Apple insisted in not allowing this and doing the OpenGL implementation the…
(Many toolkits, like Qt and Cocos2d, also use ANGLE on Windows for OpenGL functionality)
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Chicken and egg. If they remove it apps stop working, if apps don’t update they can’t remove it.
I’m not so sure they’re worried about apps breaking. They’ve certainly stuck to the “no more 32bit iOS apps” thing.
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.
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…
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> All they'll accomplish is further killing off the already-small presence they have in the gaming space. In the AAA game space you mean. Else, in the casual gaming space, iOS is perhaps the most popular platform -- and the new integration effort means all those games will be able to run on macOS as well soon.
And those games are horrible. Almost all of them are built around exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche to convince people to spend money and become addicted. The biggest difference between those games and gambling is that you don't carry a slot machine in your pocket. For the most part the only exceptions to that are the games that were ported from desktop.
But not every game are gambling. Fortnite seems to be doing great. And that shouldn't be a pay to win game.
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Nope, glVertex3f was deprecated years ago by OpenGL itself. That is not the way the API works any more. [1] Look into what it takes to write the minimum viable OpenGL program, written using non-deprecated routines, that puts a textured triangle on the screen. It sucks. On top of that, OpenGL is slow and gives you no way to create programs with smooth performance -- for example, it will randomly recompile shaders behi…
> for example, it will randomly recompile shaders behind your back while you are trying to have a smooth frame rate. What? I've written commercial games with opengl on osx/ios and my experience doesn't show that at all.
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You're right that this is ridiculous. It's time that we boycott Apple for their hostile policies! Stop developing for Apple products. Stop buying Apple products. Tell everyone you know not to buy Apple products. If enough people protest, they will eventually be forced to change.
Boycott Apple... and then what? What's the viable alternative? Android? No, thank you. At least you have some leverage over Apple by the virtue of being the customer. The competitor's business model makes it much harder to influence, which is hostile to the customer and their privacy. If you think Android is really open, think again. Without Google Play Services and Play Store you are basically hosed.
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OpenGL is pretty. Much prettier than these Metal and Vulkan abominations. The difference is that OpenGL is designed to be easy for humans. glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES); glVertex3f(x, y, z)...; glEnd(); you can't beat that. The issue is that it hard for the driver to optimize. That's where Metal and Vulkan come into play. These are low level APIs, sacrificing user friendliness for a greater control over the hardware. It is d…
Nope, glVertex3f was deprecated years ago by OpenGL itself. That is not the way the API works any more. [1] Look into what it takes to write the minimum viable OpenGL program, written using non-deprecated routines, that puts a textured triangle on the screen. It sucks. On top of that, OpenGL is slow and gives you no way to create programs with smooth performance -- for example, it will randomly recompile shaders behi…
OpenGL isn't pretty, but it's at least cross-platform. And my impression was that OpenGL support is mostly handled by the GPU manufacturers, so I'm not sure how much Apple gains here by deprecating OpenGL. Requiring developers to use an API locked to a particular platform feels pretty hostile to me. Doesn't matter if that API isn't perfect, or even far from it.
It seems like a clear signal that Apple is preparing to develop its own GPUs. They're already doing this on the iPhones.