Yes. While many people would love to paint Apple as a money grabbing evil empire, the truth is that, that’s only the half of it. The other side is that Apple is obsessed with user experience. The only way to guaranty that is to cut out the variation that’s caused by allowing any Joe Schmo adding custom parts and software into the mix. Apple doesn’t have any control over the development of Vulkan other than what they have already contributed (yes, apple at one time had a hand in it’s development). What they decided was that they needed a graphics API that was fully under their control. Not to cut out or hurt Chronos. It has nothing to do with them other that they just move at a snails pace.
Apple is also very concerned with performance per watt. Don’t forget that their main income is from mobile devices. If any API is not totally optimized for performance on those devices, it will get the boot. This had a LOT to do with the dropping of support and eventual demise of Adobe Flash. It just ran like sh*t and drained the battery. I don’t have any proof of this but I’d bet that Vulcan might have had issues with performance per watt too. I’m sure Apple wasn’t happy with how slowly Vulcan was progressing as well.
I’m sure some of the evil empire fears are not unfounded. I find that most of the time, even though I love Apple, I’m not convinced they have any idea what they are doing anymore. However, sometimes they do and I can see that dropping support for OpenGL and OpenCL (which Apple created in the first place) in favor of an all in one, higher level, modern graphics API sounded like a good idea to them at the time.
Also, this whole thing about how Apple as somehow anti-open source is totally ridiculous. Apple has contributed to and defined so many open standards it’s not funny. Look it up. The problem is that it has the potential to go against their own goals; which is tight control over the user experience.
Actually what apple does makes very much sense. Since a long time they do not consider themselves a computer maker and while all the iOS device focus really irritate the professional Mac users the big money is simply not in Macs anymore.
How they also investigate and push ARM is very impressive.
But this sadly might currently impact the Mac scene a lot. Metal makes very much sense.
A lot of game engines switched to it anyway already. But if companies from Adobe to Autodesk will do it is a different question.
I think with what they do they will be successful the question only will be if the end result will be usable for design people like us.
Oh, from what i’m observing the landscape will change (must change for global & ecological reasons). Apple has a huge “professional” market share & user base which AD never really cared to tap in (prefers industrial infrastructure design/engineering/management… relics from the 70s), but Adobe, on the other hand, is one of pioneers, applying disruptive management - first of the “giant dinosaurs” to start porting its soft/code to IOS… consequently ARM machines + cloud service = ~ 50% less power consumption = ~ 100% better efficiency. Modern human loves mobile freedom, loves to “work - play - communicate” through its encrypted (valued privacy) mobile device, wherever & whenever.
One can still see the way forward walking the a path charted by passed geniuses, democratization and free market, while other, dogmatized, follows blindly, some post-delusional ideals hoping on achieving totalitarianism & uniformity with the help of the machine.
Have some faith. Designing with Adobe is getting simplified a lot.
Give it a try??? You don’t realize how huge of an undertaking it is to create a metal interface for Blender, that is by no means trivial, it is expensive and a lot of work. And for what? The tiny tiny Mac market, while metal is used nowhere else (and it clearly just another tool for vendor lock-in and forcing users to stay in their precious walled garden (more of a walled prison, why else do you need a jail break to get free of it?
Remember, Blender is foss, they don’t make money by selling the software. All that money for the metal port can be used much better elsewhere. Apple (and their users?) are arrogant as always, they think the world revolves around them. It does not, it is much easier to just use a standard PC laptop or desktop, run Linux or Windows on it (Blender works on all of them and Linux supports both vulkan, opengl and opencl)
The biggest joke for me is metal-gp, which is supposed to replace OpenCL. I doubt that there will ever be any software using this, as sales of any software will ever pay back the development cost for that tiny tiny marketshare (3D software is even a tinier fraction of the small marketshare that Mac OS X has)
And in my assessment, Mac OS X needs Blender more than the other way around, especially since Blender is becoming super popular with Version 2.8
I do meet some people that are arrogant and think that they are superior. I don’t want to generalize all users, but a woman that I know really spoke the words “there is your problem, you are using a PC!!!”
There will always be arrogant people around. The best thing to do for anyone is to enjoy the OS and hardware that fits your needs, and to respect the choice of others.
I’ve been using several operating systems throughout the years, starting with Commodore systems, and the “my choice is better than yours” wars have been going on since forever. Some people just like to judge or provoke. Don’t mind them.
Looking at the recent developments of Apple expanding their spectrum by offering more services in stead of only hardware and operating systems, it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple would follow Microsoft in terms of more flexibility towards developers.
Having returned from a Mac to a Windows system recently, I’m encountering issues here and there that didn’t occur on a Mac, such as driver issues, bluetooth connectivity issues and such. Because Apple creates both the hardware and the OS, and doesn’t offer a wide choice of hardware configurations, there’s a very high level of compatibility and low risk of anomalies. I guess that’s an important reason Apple wants to keep control of both hardware and software development, next to the financial motive of selling hardware course.
Although I’m currently enjoying my NVIDIA-powered Windows 10 PC rig, I might very well return to a Mac when it’s time for a new system. But this depends a lot on Apple’s attitude and decisions regarding 3D hardware and software during the next few years.
Here’s what I would suggest: could the Blender Foundation, or someone maybe reach out to Apple and float the idea of Apple themselves developing the Metal 2-based version of Cycles, and making it available for download, for free or otherwise, say, on their Mac app store, as a plugin? After all, that’s what AMD did with their Pro Render: they distribute and maintain it themselves. And if Apple needs an incentive, let’s mention it to them that there are plenty of Blender users who love their Macs and don’t want to give them up, but without help, they may have no choice, because no one else can afford this effort on behalf of Apple, this time. Maybe Apple will take it up: after all, it’s their user base.
AMD didn’t just make ProRender for Blender, they made it for basically all the big CG programs, like Modo, Maya, Max, Cinema 4D, Blender, Solidworks… And even Unreal engine?!
AMD also helped improve Cycles. Did you know that Cycles had no GPU option available for AMD users a couple of years ago? Then it got implemented, but volumetrics were not supported, and it was experimental… Nowadays the only difference between OpenCL and CUDA GPU rendering is that OpenCL takes some time to bake some kernels, but even that is getting remedied.
Do you think Apple would support Blender that much? Somehow, I don’t picture them being as generous as AMD, most likely because they were the ones to force people to use a proprietary API in the first place.
So it seems that on the surface, Apple still seems to care about creators because they just updated their Mac Pro line.
Yet it also seems they’re still pushing Metal and not OpenGL/Vulkan which is what a lot of apps. fit for the Mac. Pro would need. In fact it looks like their push is more integration of iOS into OSX, which makes me wonder what the future is for FOSS on that platform (as it is all but banned on their phones and tablets).
Then again, the pricing of the new Mac. Pro means you get a machine with deteriorating experiences on apps. like Blender for the most inflated price ever devised (6000 bucks gets you just 256 GB of SSD space, an RX 580 GPU, and 32 gigs of RAM). Even sites like Maingear and Puget Systems (which charge hefty premiums for what you want) can give you a lot more machine. Oh, and you get something that’s nearly impossible to upgrade without investing in proprietary modules and a processor with the Spoiler and MDS flaws.
I’m also flabbergasted by the price. Add the $ 5000 screen and you’re investing a whopping $ 11,000 for a high-end rig you can assemble yourself as a Windows or Linux PC for less than half the expenses I guess.
I’ve been an Apple aficionado — not a fanboy — for about 5 years, but this is crazy. I can’t imagine a studio ordering 10 Mac Pros + 10 of those screens for $ 110,000, in stead of assembling 10 high-powered PCs + high-DPI screens for maybe $ 40,000.
As far as workstations go, it’s actually not all that expensive compared to PC brand workstations with similar specs. You can’t compare it to something you assemble yourself using consumer hardware, of course that’ll be massively cheaper.
Having said that, it’s still disappointing to see them move the entry price for a modular Mac up yet again.
It’s also unclear if this means NVIDIA GPUs will be an option in the future. They certainly doubled down on Metal in the presentation.
Also, those things start at over 5000$, with two extra cores more and a bigger SSD. Not exactly a world of difference.
I’m not saying this Mac is great value unless somehow you love stainless steel handles, but in terms of pricing for a pro workstation it’s not outlandish.
