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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 05 2018, @10:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-go-there dept.

Among all of the announcements by Apple at 2018 Worldwide Developers Conference today, comes the tidbit that OpenGL will be deprecated in macOS 10.14. The deprecation of OpenGL on Macs has potential implications for Linux gaming.

With news doing the rounds about the latest update to macOS, it turns out they're finally admitting they're doing nothing with their support of OpenGL and it's to be deprecated.

[...]

Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

Apps built using OpenGL and OpenCL will continue to run in macOS 10.14, but these legacy technologies are deprecated in macOS 10.14. Games and graphics-intensive apps that use OpenGL should now adopt Metal. Similarly, apps that use OpenCL for computational tasks should now adopt Metal and Metal Performance Shaders.

[...] However, this could have a big impact on Linux gaming, for better or worse. It could lead to developers either dropping Mac support due to the small market share and not being worth having to learn another (closed) API, or it could mean them dropping OpenGL in favour of Metal and not doing Linux version for the smaller again market share.

So far it's not looking good for Apple as many of the few Macintosh video game developers are raging on Twitter about this decision.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday June 05 2018, @02:06PM (4 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 05 2018, @02:06PM (#688854)

    I was motivated enough to check it out, and apple desktop sales were in a nice linear growth until 4.5M per quarter in 2012, then all growth stopped and its been a consistent 4.5M/q for the last six years aka 24 quarters. I found some articles online along the lines of "apple's 2012 year in review" and was shocked with stuff like "first year without Steve Jobs" Other than that nothing really interesting happened in 2012 to stop desktop growth. There is, however, no decline over those six years. Like clockwork about 18 million mac desktops go out the door annually.

    iphone unit sales stopped growing in 2015.

    ipad unit sales peaked in 2013 probably a lot of K12 edu sales, and have been in continuous decline since then. Hard to believe tablets have been in decline for half a decade now, doesn't seem all that long ago they were cool.

    Its going to be very interesting to watch Apple in the financial markets try to move from an innovation rapid growth stock price to a boring commodity like re-selling socks to people over and over as they wear out. There's still money in it, but stock prices always anticipate future revenue and the days of apple revenue growth are coming to an end, so the price is likely to .... The old days of "they should just shut down and give the money back to the investors" might be coming back.

    Android and smartphone in general y/y growth rate was on a long term linear decline to zero hitting around last year and there are headlines to match.

    Overall things seem very, unusually, stable and unchanging right now. No change in desktop shipments for six years, no change in phone shipments for three years, admittedly the ipad IS dying but its got a ways to go. Even competitors are flatlined.

    Probably an indication of large scale market crash. The financial wizards can hand wave away magically any growth rate significantly above zero, but when everything flatlines its crash time, can't kick the can down the road anymore at 0%. Gonna be in for a big market crash "soon-ish".

    Another novelty was the meme that the ratio of growth between desktop and mobile, if extended to infinity, meant that eventually there would be infinite mobile devices for each desktop and so on. But now that all the "growth" rates are either zero or negative, that meme is observationally dead and if nothing is done to screw it up, desktop shipments will remain about 1/10th the number of mobile sales. Given that the average phone doesn't live long due to forced upgrade cycles and physical wear and tear, whereas a seven year old desktop works great for everything but video encoding, the likely ground truth of operating population is they'll be about, eh, 4 or so phones for every desktop, which is pretty lively for a dead technology, LOL.

    Now there are huge usage variations, and huge variations in profit between devices, I'm just giving raw unit shipment data, the average building in the world will have about four phones per desktop. As for the ratio of profit earned or revenue generated, who knows, but they're physically there, is my point.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @05:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @05:52PM (#688954)

    While not a huge contributor to over all Mac sales, the Mac Pro Gen 2 was released in late 2013. With a lot of prior press about the new design format. I know of many people who refused to buy the new Mac Pro because of it's new design. That entire segment of power users were marginalized by that gen 2 design. When that happens, growth is hard to achieve.

    Then look at Macbooks since 2012. What has changed? I'm typing on a mid 2014 mac book pro right now, and it looks and works very similarly to mac book pros of earlier years and those sold today. There isn't much differentiation. If your product lines aren't getting better, how can you expect sales to increase? The faithful will continue to buy your product, but getting more market share outside your faithful is difficult.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by choose another one on Tuesday June 05 2018, @05:59PM (1 child)

    by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 05 2018, @05:59PM (#688958)

    Yeah, but look at app store revenues - still growing, still faster than linear, and forecast to increase even more (Google Play as well).

    With the control-the-device and take a cut of lifetime software sales model, Apple and Google have hit the jackpot - billions (or close to) of captive users who pay you money every time they want to do something new with the device they already have, for the lifetime of the device (and most of it is (I guess) iOS - not MacOS). Great thing about app store revenue of course is that Apple's cut is practically pure profit (ok, a bit of infrastructure cost) - someone else does the work and Apple just takes the money for being the gatekeeper.

    Tablet drop off is no surprise - there was a lot of buying them because they were the next big thing, but once people had them I think what's happened is that once they switched to do stuff on tablet it became easier and more convenient to simply do it on the phone, the device you always carry everywhere (which has got larger to facilitate this - even the term "phablet" seems to have disappeared, but the phones are still twice the size they used to be). I read recently that Apple app store already takes more money than the iPad product line. There may come a point when Apple came give the phones (maybe just a basic one) out for free and make enough on services to more than cover phone dev and mfr - but at the moment they don't need to (google more likely to do this first - part of Apple brand is its price and hence perceived exclusivity).

    Welcome to the future - here is your free magic device to access everything you need to live, now please add credit to keep it working...

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 06 2018, @01:28PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday June 06 2018, @01:28PM (#689290)

      I don't really disagree with any of that related stuff, but my main point was the meme of "desktop is dead" is itself dead, in that the meme peaked in the era between desktop growth stagnation and mobile stagnation because if you extrapolate "growing" vs "not growing" into infinity, then sure the not growing will die out, but the market shakeup is all done and the world installed base seems to have settled Very stably on roughly four phones per desktop, and at that huge of a market share it seems unlikely desktops will ever go away, regardless of the quality of the meme in the old days.

      In favor of the desktop there's the classic argument that there are a lot of mobile users using like five apps for a short amount of time per day, vs people chained to work desktops for 8+ hours every work day. In terms of total hours of human interaction I suspect the "dead" desktop is crushing the segment of women checking facebook on their phone while waiting in line at starbucks.

      You can make money off mobile or desktop, but the old meme of "desktop is dying" is itself dead.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @06:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @06:09PM (#688969)

    the worker/consumer layer is basically broke for the most part. Apple desktops and laptops are capturing a slightly higher market segment as they have holdouts in the marketing and media production sectors. But with their latest trashcan, imac and touchbar macbook pro not seeming to catch on, things may well turn nasty there.

    Beyond that, there has not really been much large changes in general in the tech world. Windows still holds the desktop crown. All iOS and Android did was to set the mobile clock back a decade (and cost us the kind of creative designs that Nokia et al produced, as everything is just glass slabs now). Intel et al are running into a dual problem of how to make chip features smaller, and what to use all that die space for without melting the chip in the process (never mind that some on-die wires are getting so long that if one push the clock too high the signal can't propagate fully before the next tick).

    Effectively the hockey stick is revealing itself to be yet another S curve, while at the same time there is a whole lot of financials looking for some place, any place, to put their currencies.