Comment by ryandrake
10 hours ago
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Yes, this is the real continuation of that. I still don't agree with the deprecation, and hope the support will be continued.