Thanks for the response. I didn’t mean to suggest that you were making anything up only that the fact that OpenGL still exists in the Apple ecosystem and developers can still use it (and will be able to use it for early incarnations of Apple Silicon), is not the same thing as holding onto OpenGL. Even within that document you link to there are a couple references to the fact that it’s deprecated and that devs should stop using it. The only question really is, when will the end-point be where they remove it from XCode / OS libraries, etc? Nobody knows that but I won’t be surprised if the answer is “one OS version past when all Macs are Apple Silicon” (basically).
Most of what you say / suggest I agree with in the sense of Apple sand-boxing everything / locking everything down to control the whole ecosystem, and that almost always being a PITA for developers. And yes, ballsy when you do not have a huge marketshare. However the last point is a bit of an anachronism. In the old days it used to be “how is Apple going to stay alive fighting MS”. Those days — and therefore the concern about market share — are long gone. Apple no longer gives a damn what MS does, or what Dell / HP does or any of that. They have built up a critical mass of iMac, MacBookPro and other Mac users to perpetuate that part of their ecosystem, which is one of the reasons they would not give NVIDIA whatever it was they would’ve been asking for in years past to “Mac NVIDIA GPUs a first-class citizen on Mac”. They didn’t care either.
Will end by saying maybe the biggest irony in all this is over the last couple years AMD has started making big strides in CPU and GPU quality and pending RDNA 2 tech is going to power PS5, Xbox, and a new series of desktop GPUs that according to leaks (FWTW) will (Finally) put them on an even footing performance-wise with NVIDIA. Hardware ray-tracing included. At the exact moment Apple signals, “hey we’re going to walk away from AMD too”. lol
As far as anyone can tell. Who knows Maybe AMD and Apple will be partnering on their pending Apple Silicon designs / Apple will be licensing some of their IP, and that’s how they intend to keep that relationship going. Will be fun (and a little scary for Mac users) to see what happens.
openGL will be available and there are also other ways to make it work however you missed out one big market for Apple and that is ios apps and games.
with apple ARM this will be accessible also for macos more or less in an instant.
while PC gaming or console gaming is fine mobile gaming is really a big and growing market where apple will get into even more now
My comments are perhaps among the most visionary and among the most radical. 2019-2020 was a period that showed the true potential and advantages of the open world. Mature open software (such as Blender and Linux systems) have reached the point of no return, where there is no reason not to choose that path and it becomes increasingly evident. At the same time, open hardware initiatives are rapidly filling this gap, they are of an exponential factor, it is not seen yet, but it could be a matter of a year or two, that these periods will seem prehistoric to us. The private companies that have dominated the market so far are almost all panicked, Great opportunities but also big shocks are in the pipeline …I remember when a few months ago we all talked about the new Mac Pro Cheese Grater and the $ 1000 i-Stand … well everything already prehistory … now we are at the “epochal” passage to ARM … only a few months later of the …cheese grater, as if they were still the time when there was the transition from powerpc to x86 processors, but according to the technology in the field today, it is less relevant than it was then … The reality I want to highlight, is that who cares about all these subtleties, the reality is that technologies are still accessible anyway … I challenge anyone who has a Mac today and who does 3D Graphics not to have even Linux or Windows installed …What I want to point out is that these virtual walls are getting thinner and thinner. In the next few years when there will be open standards for hardware too, I am referring to RISC V … there will be big laughs to do …
Open hardware are already a reality, it would be better to say open standards of ISA and there are already large companies that are investing in it, there are already the first cpu’s, controllers and much more … it is just a matter of little time to mature. and listen listen, it is ARM that is among the companies that fear this growth of open hardware standards, because the companies want to reduce the cost of royalties, so much so that recently ARM has made a new type of license for its SoC’S … and who knows that Apple has not made the decision to switch to ARM also on desktops and workstations precisely because of the new type of royalties licensing conditions:
edit:
or maybe…
The intrigues are even more complicated …
They are just rumors … but if NVIDiA really had to buy ARM … well in the near future, there will be even more to laugh about.
Go to YouTube and search ‘Maxtech’ in the latest episode, he has already curated and sifted through 2 hours of the Apple WWDC videostreams for developers.
If modeling and UI works seamless, SBCs are definitely one option that should be explored. For blender I can see a scenario with a client (SoC/Laptop + large screen or XP pen artist / wacom / ipad + pen) and then offloading resource heavy things to other machines, maybe buildbarn (server or multiple SBCs) for compiling, CEPH (on SBCs) for storage and a rendering farm (including your old high-end desktop?). If you want more speed-up than you have at home/office you could temporarily scale to any existing cloud service.
When I’m planning IT infrastructure now, i’m thinking in those terms. I don’t know if we there yet (client needs to be relatively fat to avoid latencies) with RPi4:s but things are moving fast in the SBC world. If chips with FPGAs can drop in price and get mainstream there will be yet another ballgame (maybe a rendering farm with multiple cheap SBCs, scale as you want).
Pleasant surprise: Reportedly, not only can the M1 emulate x86 faster than x86 can execute it natively, but it also runs a hell of a lot cooler – while overheating and slowing down to a crawl is the main problem I have with the x86 MBP.
Tests show Apple’s M1 emulates x86 faster than Intel can run it natively
Finally there is a computer that has battery life, runs Blender really well and is extremely portable. No need to just pick two
I was positively surprised how well the base model Macbook Air handles Blender, the unofficial Arm64 builds as well as the regular release with Rosetta.
I suppose blender x86 should run light especially because the heaviest part is the OpenGL part and that is native through the API whether it was with x86 or with ARM and if they did a great job of emulating x86 for those functions that require the use of “cpu x86” then everything should be smooth.
