Not sure who is moving to direct Vulkan but most likely it'll end up being a buggy mess
Unity, Unreal, IdTech6 are some pretty big names that have Vulkan support just fine. Unity even has it for its Android version.
manual memory management in large projects?
Yes, where do you get the idea that memory is just magically managed for you in OpenGL (or Metal)? You realize you still need to allocate and deallocate buffers in OpenGL and check whether the allocation does indeed succeed, the basics of memory management. In OpenGL the default behaviour for the driver is to shuffle memory in and out of vram and system ram in oversubscription cases, if you're fine with that performance loss and want OpenGL-like behaviour you can store your resources in host-local type buffers in Vulkan or MTLStorageModeShared in Metal but having control of this at the engine/middleware level (maybe not so much the application level) rather than leaving it purely to the driver is a good thing. Drivers are bloating out with application-specific optimizations simply because the developers know what they want but aren't afforded that level of control in OpenGL.
The bad thing about OpenGL is that it's not going anywhere (stagnant).
Certainly in an Apple-centric world it might appear that way, the latest version of OpenGL that Apple supports is 4.1 which was released in 2010. Apple's support of OpenGL stagnated long before Metal came about, back then OpenGL didn't even have compute shaders and as a result you can't run OpenGL compute shaders on any Mac despite them being introduced 6 years ago.
Don’t the big engines already support Metal? Unreal, Unity, etc.? Last I checked they all already support it.
Yep they do.
Vulkan will hopefully receive third-party support on macOS and perhaps iOS eventually
It's already there. Instead of just breaking from Khronos and going off and doing their own thing it would have made sense to contribute Metal to Khronos as an industry standard, or at least make it an open spec.
Also, Even if Office doesn't meet the above requirement, you can bet that M$ will crank up the FUD campaign to beat you down and protect it's market share.
Where has this happened wrt OpenOffice, LibreOffice, iLife, Google Docs, etc... I'm quite sure all of these provide some competition so where is the MS FUD campaign against them?
a drop in replacement for Office that can read all the current document formats
Why? By many accounts here (though I've never seen an example) MS Office isn't even compatible with other versions of MS Office so really any inertia related to format lock-in is lost every version anyway, there should be nothing stopping people switching to LibreOffice aside from features...well and of course that Office365 is available on all major platforms via either native applications or the web version, LibreOffice is a long way behind in that regard.
If they can make this work on a technical level then I certainly think there's a significant market for a Netflix-style monthly subscription where you can play any games in the library and in that scenario there is no concept of used games (just like there's no concept of used movies in the Netflix/Hulu/etc environment).
That depends on how much you use it. Sure if you're buying one movie every month it might be cheaper to do that than a Netflix subscription but I'd guess most people get more value from a Netflix subscription than they would if they were buying everything they watched.
I think what is being streamed is less important than what we are losing which is control of our purchase.
If you're only just realizing that about consoles now then you're just ridiculously slow to catch on. I know there is the concept that because you paid money you must get something that you have control of but in this case it's about paying for a service rather than a product, alternatively PC gaming is still thriving and there's plenty of titles as well as the ability to actually produce your own.
I have a 2015 MBP and I'm sticking with that as long as I can for exactly the reasons you stated there being downsides of the newer versions. I'm not advocating for the Macbook, I'm saying it's the mediocre middle ground that is really a jack of all trades and master of none. For any specialized use case you would almost definitely go for some kind of Windows laptop, I mean even the highest spec, most expensive Macbook Pro is a *long* way from the laptop performance crown in pretty much every measurable way.
Yes, except that there are far more Windows laptops in the wild than Macbooks. If you want herd immunity or the benefits that come from swimming in the most popular lane, then you'd probably want to choose a Windows laptop.
Which one (or two)? Because it's not about just the OS, it's about the product as a whole. If there is some hardware or software issue with say an Acer VivoBook you're much less likely to find support for it than you are for a Macbook, the fact that new Macbook Pros had an undesirable keyboard was frontpage news on most tech sites!
Again, aside from the somewhat abstracted benefits of following popularity or prevalence in the computing ecosystem, it doesn't really confer any local advantage whether you go with a Windows laptop or a Macbook.
Of course it does, economies of scale operates in support and service as well.
If 90% of the crowd in the airport or on campus has the same OS as you, that's nice, but that doesn't mean it confers any actual benefit to you in a tangible, personal way. They still won't loan you their charger or HDMI cable.
I never said or implied that it did, it's weird that you're still harping on about this when I already pointed that out to you. Are you going to need it explained a third time or have you got it now?
I actually thought Windows Phone was just fine (also webOS, Meego and a few others) but they were all too late to the game and just didn't offer any innovation or compelling reason to switch from the incumbents. You can't just enter an established market with a me-too offering and expect to capture any of that market.
Other than motivation for developers to write software, how does the fact that other people have a Mac (or PC, or whatever) make it a "safe bet"? What does that mean? That is, what is everyone betting on?
It's the same hardware and design that everybody else has so chances are if there is a serious design or manufacturing fault then everybody is going to have it and that puts much more weight behind it being fixed (see the keyboard issue as an example). Also community support is obviously much better when everybody is using the same product.
Most software we use these days (speaking very generally) is web based and works with any browser.
Maybe most software you use is, but that isn't the reality for most people. Many of the tasks common to the majority of users have web based versions but just because the majority of people do email, web browsing and IM doesn't mean that's all they do.
And I'm also unsure why having them in airports and campuses is some sort of benefit to anyone.
I'm unsure why you think I was implying that, feel free to point out why you think that though. What I'm saying is they're everywhere, if you need a laptop beyond simple web-based apps (for which a Chromebook should suffice) and you don't have any specific or demanding compute requirements then most people seem to just buy a MacBook.
I think the real reason is because MacBooks have kind of become the Windows of the laptop world, you get them because it's what everybody else has so it's the safe bet. They're everywhere across airport lounges to university campuses and they can run macOS, Linux and/or Windows, they have very limited configuration options so they are easy to manage, when they do break you can just take them into the official shop for repair rather than having to send them off, Apple has left the high performance and lowend markets to their competitors and provide a middling product for the majority. There isn't really a compelling reason to get one but there's not really a compelling reason not to either, they even mitigate the relatively poor value proposition with 0% interest financing options.
These days the people who don't have them are the people who either don't want them or are at the very low end of the price bracket that is really dominated by Chromebooks. In recent years the quality value proposition has died off too, they used to be way more reliable but my last 3 macbooks have had to go in for repair from creaky chassis to dead USB ports to rattling fans which really comes from poor quality control but at least when they do go wrong it's easy to get them fixed. For high performance computing there are way better options but for your average user the MacBook "Pro" covers pretty much everything.
That is completely wrong as any idiot can see. Microsoft would love to own the webserver, data center, HPC and embedded spaces that Linux rules, don't kid yourself.
What company wouldn't love that? Fact is they don't and they really can't, they gave up on trying to compete in markets that they clearly can't compete with Linux in and instead are leveraging Linux as a tool to run their business just like everybody else. Destroying Linux makes no sense and in fact even when Ballmer famously said 'Linux is a cancer' quite clearly he wasn't even referring to Linux at all but the viral nature of the GPL, not to mention at the time quite a lot (though less than what they have now) of Microsoft's own infrastructure was running on Linux.
And as everybody knows, Microsoft still viciously fights to keep its hold on the desktop, though even that is starting to crack. Linux guys have certainly not given up competing in that space, the Plasma desktop I am posting this from says otherwise, in large beautiful, antialiased, free and open fonts.
Right but Linux is hardly a competitor to Windows on the desktop for the same reasons we've seen countless decent mobile operating systems fail to disrupt the incumbents. If Linux (or anybody for that matter) offers something truly innovative in the desktop space like what the iPhone did for the smartphone space then disruption will occur but the lack of that kind of innovation is why this still hasn't happened in the desktop. There will always be a minority that will find just about anything appealing in some way as is the case with Linux on the desktop...personally I use macOS primarily, Linux for all my highend GPU stuff, Windows for gaming and my fileserver still runs BSD.
It's been decades and HURD isn't even remotely usable. In a shorter time than that Apple has gone from the brink of bankruptcy to the most valuable company in the world, Microsoft has moved from a company with a CEO that called Linux (or rather the GPL) a cancer to one that's most profitable business segment depends on Linux and even has a Linux compatibility layer in Windows, Google completely dominating search, Amazon going from just online shopping to a cloud computing giant that relies on Linux and Linux powering the probably the most used consumer operating system in the world in the form of Android.
All of these companies have a heavy investment in the continued success of Linux, really the only thing about the world that didn't change is that HURD is still junk.
If you are Google it pays to purchase some cheap insurance against Microsoft doing something that could screw you.
What could they do? Actually more to the point why would they do it? Microsoft and Google both use Linux to run critical parts of their cloud infrastructure which is one of the biggest and most profitable parts of their respective businesses. Anybody thinking Microsoft has any interest in destroying Linux needs to get with the times and stop living in the early Ballmer-era of Microsoft.
These days there is very little overlap between Windows and Linux, they simply aren't competitors in the vast majority of spaces that they are used.
I like the MIT license. It gives people and businesses the freedom to use my stuff.
I prefer it too because it allows people with different ideologies to collaborate, I'm giving it away to be used so I'm not going to impose restrictions on what you do with it or force your hand on how you license things you add to it. If you want to release your modifications that's great, if you only want to contribute some bits back that's cool, if not that's fine too.
They didn't say it would be a couple of years but in any case why release a gaming product that isn't significantly different than their last gaming product? For example the TitanV doesn't perform that much better than the TitanX in gaming because the key thing the Volta architecture introduced is the tensor cores which are great for machine learning and AI applications as well as the denoising step in ray tracing applications but they don't do anything for gamers so there's little point putting out a Volta-based Geforce line of products.
These days GPU vendors don't just serve PC gamers.
As I said I have a portable workstation, and do use it *occasionally* for process intensive type work.
Yeah but what I was asking is what do you think people use these machines for? Are you saying you think everybody uses them the same as you do? If they aren't used for CAD/CAM/CAD, video editing, audio composition, scientific computing, etc... then why would anybody buy these horrendous things and lug them around instead of a more appropriate machine? The answer is they are used for those tasks, that's why they exist, they're bought more by companies than by individuals and they're the goto machine in industries like the mining industry where you're dealing with massive datasets on site.
Perhaps there is some small niche it might be useful.
Yes and that is the point. The fact that it exists doesn't mean you have to buy it, if anything it means it drives down the cost of lower end machines that suit your work so that's a good thing. Even if there were people buying 128GB for "bragging rights" I'm not sure why you're so impressed or offended by that, who gives a shit?! You actually believe companies are bragging about how much RAM is in their employees' laptops? Get real.
After WWDC in 2012 Tim Cook came out and said of the Mac Pro iFuckedUp, then more recently of the trashcan Apple has come out and said of the Mac Pro iFuckedUpAgain. So yes they have been screwing up the Mac Pro for many years and they themselves have admitted that, hopefully third time's the charm and we'll get something decent that actually gets supported well.
They never said any such thing, all they said is the next Geforce GPUs won't be out for a long time, which is of course that the Turing architecture GPUs will be out toward the end of this year. I'm not sure why you're focussing on games, for a professional machine I'm not really that interested in gaming though I'm sure some people are.
Then why oh why are you worrying so much about having the fastest GPUs? All they are good for is gaming and cryptocurrency-mining.
And scientific computing, CAD/CAM/CAE...you think we're running physics simulations and visualization on the CPU?
My point is that I am a Mac user, I really like the Mac platform and I want at least the possibility of getting a Mac with decent GPU performance but at the moment it's not even close to the top end of what was available in PCs in 2016. I don't care about what excuses you're making for them (kind of a weird thing to do anyway) I just want a Mac with decent GPU performance.
No I didn't call it "several years", not sure what you're quoting there. I did say "many" because there was no meaningful update for a long time, so much so that after the lame update at 2012 WWDC the real Tim Cook sent out a message responding to the criticism and promising an update...which came in the form of the trashcan. Yes I get lots of engineering went into it, lots of engineering goes into a lot of crap things.
The trashcan would have actually been just fine (not great but fine) if they had followed through with it and actually released it with decent hardware updates. I'm not that interested in upgrading individual components but as a Mac user I want to be able to buy one with state of the art hardware and I'm afraid AMD GPUs simply do not cut it.
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Not sure who is moving to direct Vulkan but most likely it'll end up being a buggy mess
Unity, Unreal, IdTech6 are some pretty big names that have Vulkan support just fine. Unity even has it for its Android version.
manual memory management in large projects?
Yes, where do you get the idea that memory is just magically managed for you in OpenGL (or Metal)? You realize you still need to allocate and deallocate buffers in OpenGL and check whether the allocation does indeed succeed, the basics of memory management. In OpenGL the default behaviour for the driver is to shuffle memory in and out of vram and system ram in oversubscription cases, if you're fine with that performance loss and want OpenGL-like behaviour you can store your resources in host-local type buffers in Vulkan or MTLStorageModeShared in Metal but having control of this at the engine/middleware level (maybe not so much the application level) rather than leaving it purely to the driver is a good thing. Drivers are bloating out with application-specific optimizations simply because the developers know what they want but aren't afforded that level of control in OpenGL.
The bad thing about OpenGL is that it's not going anywhere (stagnant).
Certainly in an Apple-centric world it might appear that way, the latest version of OpenGL that Apple supports is 4.1 which was released in 2010. Apple's support of OpenGL stagnated long before Metal came about, back then OpenGL didn't even have compute shaders and as a result you can't run OpenGL compute shaders on any Mac despite them being introduced 6 years ago.
Don’t the big engines already support Metal? Unreal, Unity, etc.? Last I checked they all already support it.
Yep they do.
Vulkan will hopefully receive third-party support on macOS and perhaps iOS eventually
It's already there. Instead of just breaking from Khronos and going off and doing their own thing it would have made sense to contribute Metal to Khronos as an industry standard, or at least make it an open spec.
Also, Even if Office doesn't meet the above requirement, you can bet that M$ will crank up the FUD campaign to beat you down and protect it's market share.
Where has this happened wrt OpenOffice, LibreOffice, iLife, Google Docs, etc... I'm quite sure all of these provide some competition so where is the MS FUD campaign against them?
a drop in replacement for Office that can read all the current document formats
Why? By many accounts here (though I've never seen an example) MS Office isn't even compatible with other versions of MS Office so really any inertia related to format lock-in is lost every version anyway, there should be nothing stopping people switching to LibreOffice aside from features...well and of course that Office365 is available on all major platforms via either native applications or the web version, LibreOffice is a long way behind in that regard.
If they can make this work on a technical level then I certainly think there's a significant market for a Netflix-style monthly subscription where you can play any games in the library and in that scenario there is no concept of used games (just like there's no concept of used movies in the Netflix/Hulu/etc environment).
That depends on how much you use it. Sure if you're buying one movie every month it might be cheaper to do that than a Netflix subscription but I'd guess most people get more value from a Netflix subscription than they would if they were buying everything they watched.
I think what is being streamed is less important than what we are losing which is control of our purchase.
If you're only just realizing that about consoles now then you're just ridiculously slow to catch on. I know there is the concept that because you paid money you must get something that you have control of but in this case it's about paying for a service rather than a product, alternatively PC gaming is still thriving and there's plenty of titles as well as the ability to actually produce your own.
I'm not trying to sell you on the idea, I'm just explaining why the macbook is the product for the herd mentality.
I have a 2015 MBP and I'm sticking with that as long as I can for exactly the reasons you stated there being downsides of the newer versions. I'm not advocating for the Macbook, I'm saying it's the mediocre middle ground that is really a jack of all trades and master of none. For any specialized use case you would almost definitely go for some kind of Windows laptop, I mean even the highest spec, most expensive Macbook Pro is a *long* way from the laptop performance crown in pretty much every measurable way.
Yes, except that there are far more Windows laptops in the wild than Macbooks. If you want herd immunity or the benefits that come from swimming in the most popular lane, then you'd probably want to choose a Windows laptop.
Which one (or two)? Because it's not about just the OS, it's about the product as a whole. If there is some hardware or software issue with say an Acer VivoBook you're much less likely to find support for it than you are for a Macbook, the fact that new Macbook Pros had an undesirable keyboard was frontpage news on most tech sites!
Again, aside from the somewhat abstracted benefits of following popularity or prevalence in the computing ecosystem, it doesn't really confer any local advantage whether you go with a Windows laptop or a Macbook.
Of course it does, economies of scale operates in support and service as well.
If 90% of the crowd in the airport or on campus has the same OS as you, that's nice, but that doesn't mean it confers any actual benefit to you in a tangible, personal way. They still won't loan you their charger or HDMI cable.
I never said or implied that it did, it's weird that you're still harping on about this when I already pointed that out to you. Are you going to need it explained a third time or have you got it now?
I actually thought Windows Phone was just fine (also webOS, Meego and a few others) but they were all too late to the game and just didn't offer any innovation or compelling reason to switch from the incumbents. You can't just enter an established market with a me-too offering and expect to capture any of that market.
Well yes, anecdotal evidence but that doesn't refute any of the other premises I described.
Other than motivation for developers to write software, how does the fact that other people have a Mac (or PC, or whatever) make it a "safe bet"? What does that mean? That is, what is everyone betting on?
It's the same hardware and design that everybody else has so chances are if there is a serious design or manufacturing fault then everybody is going to have it and that puts much more weight behind it being fixed (see the keyboard issue as an example). Also community support is obviously much better when everybody is using the same product.
Most software we use these days (speaking very generally) is web based and works with any browser.
Maybe most software you use is, but that isn't the reality for most people. Many of the tasks common to the majority of users have web based versions but just because the majority of people do email, web browsing and IM doesn't mean that's all they do.
And I'm also unsure why having them in airports and campuses is some sort of benefit to anyone.
I'm unsure why you think I was implying that, feel free to point out why you think that though. What I'm saying is they're everywhere, if you need a laptop beyond simple web-based apps (for which a Chromebook should suffice) and you don't have any specific or demanding compute requirements then most people seem to just buy a MacBook.
I think the real reason is because MacBooks have kind of become the Windows of the laptop world, you get them because it's what everybody else has so it's the safe bet. They're everywhere across airport lounges to university campuses and they can run macOS, Linux and/or Windows, they have very limited configuration options so they are easy to manage, when they do break you can just take them into the official shop for repair rather than having to send them off, Apple has left the high performance and lowend markets to their competitors and provide a middling product for the majority. There isn't really a compelling reason to get one but there's not really a compelling reason not to either, they even mitigate the relatively poor value proposition with 0% interest financing options.
These days the people who don't have them are the people who either don't want them or are at the very low end of the price bracket that is really dominated by Chromebooks. In recent years the quality value proposition has died off too, they used to be way more reliable but my last 3 macbooks have had to go in for repair from creaky chassis to dead USB ports to rattling fans which really comes from poor quality control but at least when they do go wrong it's easy to get them fixed. For high performance computing there are way better options but for your average user the MacBook "Pro" covers pretty much everything.
That is completely wrong as any idiot can see. Microsoft would love to own the webserver, data center, HPC and embedded spaces that Linux rules, don't kid yourself.
What company wouldn't love that? Fact is they don't and they really can't, they gave up on trying to compete in markets that they clearly can't compete with Linux in and instead are leveraging Linux as a tool to run their business just like everybody else. Destroying Linux makes no sense and in fact even when Ballmer famously said 'Linux is a cancer' quite clearly he wasn't even referring to Linux at all but the viral nature of the GPL, not to mention at the time quite a lot (though less than what they have now) of Microsoft's own infrastructure was running on Linux.
And as everybody knows, Microsoft still viciously fights to keep its hold on the desktop, though even that is starting to crack. Linux guys have certainly not given up competing in that space, the Plasma desktop I am posting this from says otherwise, in large beautiful, antialiased, free and open fonts.
Right but Linux is hardly a competitor to Windows on the desktop for the same reasons we've seen countless decent mobile operating systems fail to disrupt the incumbents. If Linux (or anybody for that matter) offers something truly innovative in the desktop space like what the iPhone did for the smartphone space then disruption will occur but the lack of that kind of innovation is why this still hasn't happened in the desktop. There will always be a minority that will find just about anything appealing in some way as is the case with Linux on the desktop...personally I use macOS primarily, Linux for all my highend GPU stuff, Windows for gaming and my fileserver still runs BSD.
It's been decades and HURD isn't even remotely usable. In a shorter time than that Apple has gone from the brink of bankruptcy to the most valuable company in the world, Microsoft has moved from a company with a CEO that called Linux (or rather the GPL) a cancer to one that's most profitable business segment depends on Linux and even has a Linux compatibility layer in Windows, Google completely dominating search, Amazon going from just online shopping to a cloud computing giant that relies on Linux and Linux powering the probably the most used consumer operating system in the world in the form of Android.
All of these companies have a heavy investment in the continued success of Linux, really the only thing about the world that didn't change is that HURD is still junk.
If you are Google it pays to purchase some cheap insurance against Microsoft doing something that could screw you.
What could they do? Actually more to the point why would they do it? Microsoft and Google both use Linux to run critical parts of their cloud infrastructure which is one of the biggest and most profitable parts of their respective businesses. Anybody thinking Microsoft has any interest in destroying Linux needs to get with the times and stop living in the early Ballmer-era of Microsoft.
These days there is very little overlap between Windows and Linux, they simply aren't competitors in the vast majority of spaces that they are used.
I like the MIT license. It gives people and businesses the freedom to use my stuff.
I prefer it too because it allows people with different ideologies to collaborate, I'm giving it away to be used so I'm not going to impose restrictions on what you do with it or force your hand on how you license things you add to it. If you want to release your modifications that's great, if you only want to contribute some bits back that's cool, if not that's fine too.
They didn't say it would be a couple of years but in any case why release a gaming product that isn't significantly different than their last gaming product? For example the TitanV doesn't perform that much better than the TitanX in gaming because the key thing the Volta architecture introduced is the tensor cores which are great for machine learning and AI applications as well as the denoising step in ray tracing applications but they don't do anything for gamers so there's little point putting out a Volta-based Geforce line of products.
These days GPU vendors don't just serve PC gamers.
I'd be happy with an eGPU if it supported nVidia GPUs properly.
As I said I have a portable workstation, and do use it *occasionally* for process intensive type work.
Yeah but what I was asking is what do you think people use these machines for? Are you saying you think everybody uses them the same as you do? If they aren't used for CAD/CAM/CAD, video editing, audio composition, scientific computing, etc... then why would anybody buy these horrendous things and lug them around instead of a more appropriate machine? The answer is they are used for those tasks, that's why they exist, they're bought more by companies than by individuals and they're the goto machine in industries like the mining industry where you're dealing with massive datasets on site.
Perhaps there is some small niche it might be useful.
Yes and that is the point. The fact that it exists doesn't mean you have to buy it, if anything it means it drives down the cost of lower end machines that suit your work so that's a good thing. Even if there were people buying 128GB for "bragging rights" I'm not sure why you're so impressed or offended by that, who gives a shit?! You actually believe companies are bragging about how much RAM is in their employees' laptops? Get real.
After WWDC in 2012 Tim Cook came out and said of the Mac Pro iFuckedUp, then more recently of the trashcan Apple has come out and said of the Mac Pro iFuckedUpAgain. So yes they have been screwing up the Mac Pro for many years and they themselves have admitted that, hopefully third time's the charm and we'll get something decent that actually gets supported well.
They never said any such thing, all they said is the next Geforce GPUs won't be out for a long time, which is of course that the Turing architecture GPUs will be out toward the end of this year. I'm not sure why you're focussing on games, for a professional machine I'm not really that interested in gaming though I'm sure some people are.
Then why oh why are you worrying so much about having the fastest GPUs? All they are good for is gaming and cryptocurrency-mining.
And scientific computing, CAD/CAM/CAE ...you think we're running physics simulations and visualization on the CPU?
My point is that I am a Mac user, I really like the Mac platform and I want at least the possibility of getting a Mac with decent GPU performance but at the moment it's not even close to the top end of what was available in PCs in 2016. I don't care about what excuses you're making for them (kind of a weird thing to do anyway) I just want a Mac with decent GPU performance.
No I didn't call it "several years", not sure what you're quoting there. I did say "many" because there was no meaningful update for a long time, so much so that after the lame update at 2012 WWDC the real Tim Cook sent out a message responding to the criticism and promising an update...which came in the form of the trashcan. Yes I get lots of engineering went into it, lots of engineering goes into a lot of crap things.
The trashcan would have actually been just fine (not great but fine) if they had followed through with it and actually released it with decent hardware updates. I'm not that interested in upgrading individual components but as a Mac user I want to be able to buy one with state of the art hardware and I'm afraid AMD GPUs simply do not cut it.