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That article is pretty salty, it seems they want Apply to supply them with OpenGL "or else". Either they are using an engine that doesn't allow for other low le

That article is pretty salty, it seems they want Apply to supply them with OpenGL "or else". Either they are using an engine that doesn't allow for other low level rendering options or they simply don't want to.

striking 8y ago
I don't blame them. If the market on macOS isn't big enough to justify a Metal rewrite, I'd do the same.
larsiusprime 8y ago
Seems rational to me. Why should a vendor continue to support an operating system with only ~6% global market share, now that continuing to reach that tiny sliver suddenly requires that they rewrite their entire rendering stack to target Apple's proprietary API's that don't work anywhere else?
- Rjevski 8y ago
  This marketshare might be much more in terms of their userbase though. Macs are dominant in the creative industries.
  - larsiusprime 8y ago
    I bet Autodesk has extremely precise information about how big their mac userbase is for these products, and I'm going to guess that it's not enough to justify an entire rewrite using a proprietary Mac rendering system. I'm certain they've done the math and are confident that it's better for them to expect users will either switch to PC's, install Windows using bootcamp, or stay on old versions of Mac OS. They say as much right in the article.
  - delfinom 8y ago
    I assure you that creative space is the arts and the high level software domain. Engineers (mechanical, low level software, firmware) are Windows and Linux predominately.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    Remember that Apple started screwing up as Microsoft got its shit together. My guess is the defective laptop issue alone is driving a measurebale shift. The reason many folks were going Mac was the Unix tool chain, which Apple is also allowing to rot. Microsoft is basically shipping Ubuntu.
    - Rjevski 8y ago
      I’m not sure where is Microsoft getting their shit together. Last time I checked, Windows 10 is still a shit-show and completely unusable as a workstation. It’s good as a toy to play Candy Crush, sure (it even comes preinstalled!) but definitely not suitable for real work.
      - MegaDeKay 8y ago
        If you want something better suited for a workstation, then the Enterprise / LTSB versions are what you are after. Better privacy controls and no Candy Crush. A great many people use it for real work every day.
        Rjevski 8y ago
        What’s the price of a license for a single machine? I bet it’s really expensive and rivals the price of a Mac, at which point I’m not sure why you’d go for the Microsoft option (even the Enterprise version has its quirks and isn’t as polished as Mac OS).
        trynewideas 8y ago
        It's quoted and depends on whether you buy it per user or per device, and the pricing just changed a couple of days ago. But generally it's been $80-$170/year. The per-user licensing allows for installs on multiple devices (5, I think, unless that also recently changed), so it can work out to about $35 per device. The Enterprise licenses used to revert to Pro licenses when the subscription expired, not sure if they still do.
      - 8y ago
  - deltron3030 8y ago
    > Macs are dominant in the creative industries. Only when it comes to professional graphic design. But there's also professional CAD (almost entirely PC based), and the hobbiest space that originates from video game and anime culture, modding and fan art.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
snarfy 8y ago
It should be salty. It's extremely arrogant to kill OpenGL and expect all app developers to rewrite their apps using Metal. The last I looked MacOS market share wasn't doing so well. And how much of that market is CAD? Maybe they did a simple ROI calculation and determined it simply was not worth the development, but might have been if Apple would meet them half way and support OpenGL.
- jchb 8y ago
  The other Autodesk products use DirectX rather than OpenGL on Windows since years back. Apparently a big reason for this was the sketchy OpenGL driver support on Windows, which caused issues with many consumer-level graphics cards. So this is not necessarily an issue with Apples deprecation of OpenGL, but could as well be Autodesk wanting to move also the Alias product to DirectX only.
- chongli 8y ago
  Total macOS marketshare is irrelevant. The vast majority of Windows home and office PCs are never going to install Alias. A better question is what's the relative marketshare in the 3D content creation and video production space? There I think you'll find Macs doing a lot better (or at least they were when Apple actually had a pro machine people wanted).
  - iainmerrick 8y ago
    So Apple gets to decide if they want to spend resources to support that market (maintaining OpenGL) and Autodesk similarly get to decide if they want to support Macs (by porting to Metal). Looks like both have signaled that high-end CAD on Macs is not big enough to be worth their time. This seems more damaging to Apple than to Autodesk. If Apple let these niche-but-lucrative markets wither away one by one, where does the Mac end up?
    - chongli 8y ago
      This seems more damaging to Apple than to Autodesk. I think that's very difficult for us to judge. Apple has access to far more data than we do. They may have decided that Autodesk's entire market is not worth their time. Apple is a very strange company. Even though they're among the largest companies in the entire world in terms of value, they don't operate like a large company. They shift their product teams around all the time which seems to cause some products to get neglected for a really long time.
blattimwind 8y ago
Apple: OpenGL is now discontinued on our OS. ISV: We're not going to do a special port to $proprietaryAPI of $singlepercentmarketshareOS of our x-million LOC each applications. Hackernews: Look how salty $ISV is.
- oneplane 8y ago
  ISV had years do to this, and when porting the first time did this for macOS-only anyway (Windows uses DirectX). Moving from OpenGL 2 to OpenGL 4 would have been just as much work as moving to Metal 2.
cesarb 8y ago
> Either they are using an engine that doesn't allow for other low level rendering options According to Wikipedia, the first version of Alias is from the 80s, and it initially ran only on IRIX. From that, I'd guess that it was initially written using IRIS GL, the predecessor of OpenGL. It probably doesn't have a separate "rendering engine"; IRIS GL and later OpenGL concepts and calls are probably strewn all over the code. Porting to anything else would probably be a significant effort.
jakobegger 8y ago
With recent releases, Apple has been breaking things every year. They remove support for Obj-C GC, 32bit apps, Open GL, they limit Apple Script, they make it hard to run unsigned code, make it harder to run certain kinds of apps, etc. Each deprecation on its own is understandable, and probably makes sense when the goal is a modern, safer OS. But when macOS is not your main target market, at some point it doesn't pay off anymore to try to keep up with the annual technology changes. If you have a big code base, those yearly modernisations are a lot of effort. And Apple doesn't make the impression that they care about things they break. I've filed a lot of bug reports with Apple for regressions, but if it's not a mainstream issue they just won't fix it. If you're lucky, you'll get a reply saying that they don't support your use case anymore. So they just break some stuff, and app developers need to find workarounds. I really understand if at some point the developer says, this isn't worth it, we'll just focus on the more profitable platform. At the price range of Autodesk, buying a new PC to run the software isn't really a big issue...
- oneplane 8y ago
  I suppose they somewhat directly contradict Microsoft's model where they try to keep supporting certain API and ABI compatibilities for over 20 years. As 'easy' as that is for the third party developer, it might not be the best way to handle an operating system. New insights are constantly gained, and older systems still have faults; the Microsoft model leaves you with a broken system that cannot be fixed until a major redesign, the Apple model leaves you with broken third party software that can be fixed by the developer but nobody else.
coldcode 8y ago
Guessing its probably a 32 bit app as well. Old crufty codebases are too hard to make radical changes to. I'm sure they rather keep shipping an ancient crappy codebase for huge piles of $$$ then rewrite it and have to spend money. Converting well written OpenGl to Metal is not all that hard. Converting a dreadful pile of crap to anything is.

striking 8y ago

I don't blame them. If the market on macOS isn't big enough to justify a Metal rewrite, I'd do the same.

larsiusprime 8y ago

Seems rational to me. Why should a vendor continue to support an operating system with only ~6% global market share, now that continuing to reach that tiny sliver suddenly requires that they rewrite their entire rendering stack to target Apple's proprietary API's that don't work anywhere else?

Rjevski 8y ago
This marketshare might be much more in terms of their userbase though. Macs are dominant in the creative industries.
- larsiusprime 8y ago
  I bet Autodesk has extremely precise information about how big their mac userbase is for these products, and I'm going to guess that it's not enough to justify an entire rewrite using a proprietary Mac rendering system. I'm certain they've done the math and are confident that it's better for them to expect users will either switch to PC's, install Windows using bootcamp, or stay on old versions of Mac OS. They say as much right in the article.
- delfinom 8y ago
  I assure you that creative space is the arts and the high level software domain. Engineers (mechanical, low level software, firmware) are Windows and Linux predominately.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Remember that Apple started screwing up as Microsoft got its shit together. My guess is the defective laptop issue alone is driving a measurebale shift. The reason many folks were going Mac was the Unix tool chain, which Apple is also allowing to rot. Microsoft is basically shipping Ubuntu.
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    I’m not sure where is Microsoft getting their shit together. Last time I checked, Windows 10 is still a shit-show and completely unusable as a workstation. It’s good as a toy to play Candy Crush, sure (it even comes preinstalled!) but definitely not suitable for real work.
    - MegaDeKay 8y ago
      If you want something better suited for a workstation, then the Enterprise / LTSB versions are what you are after. Better privacy controls and no Candy Crush. A great many people use it for real work every day.
      - Rjevski 8y ago
        What’s the price of a license for a single machine? I bet it’s really expensive and rivals the price of a Mac, at which point I’m not sure why you’d go for the Microsoft option (even the Enterprise version has its quirks and isn’t as polished as Mac OS).
        trynewideas 8y ago
        It's quoted and depends on whether you buy it per user or per device, and the pricing just changed a couple of days ago. But generally it's been $80-$170/year. The per-user licensing allows for installs on multiple devices (5, I think, unless that also recently changed), so it can work out to about $35 per device. The Enterprise licenses used to revert to Pro licenses when the subscription expired, not sure if they still do.
    - 8y ago
- deltron3030 8y ago
  > Macs are dominant in the creative industries. Only when it comes to professional graphic design. But there's also professional CAD (almost entirely PC based), and the hobbiest space that originates from video game and anime culture, modding and fan art.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

snarfy 8y ago

It should be salty. It's extremely arrogant to kill OpenGL and expect all app developers to rewrite their apps using Metal. The last I looked MacOS market share wasn't doing so well. And how much of that market is CAD? Maybe they did a simple ROI calculation and determined it simply was not worth the development, but might have been if Apple would meet them half way and support OpenGL.

jchb 8y ago
The other Autodesk products use DirectX rather than OpenGL on Windows since years back. Apparently a big reason for this was the sketchy OpenGL driver support on Windows, which caused issues with many consumer-level graphics cards. So this is not necessarily an issue with Apples deprecation of OpenGL, but could as well be Autodesk wanting to move also the Alias product to DirectX only.
chongli 8y ago
Total macOS marketshare is irrelevant. The vast majority of Windows home and office PCs are never going to install Alias. A better question is what's the relative marketshare in the 3D content creation and video production space? There I think you'll find Macs doing a lot better (or at least they were when Apple actually had a pro machine people wanted).
- iainmerrick 8y ago
  So Apple gets to decide if they want to spend resources to support that market (maintaining OpenGL) and Autodesk similarly get to decide if they want to support Macs (by porting to Metal). Looks like both have signaled that high-end CAD on Macs is not big enough to be worth their time. This seems more damaging to Apple than to Autodesk. If Apple let these niche-but-lucrative markets wither away one by one, where does the Mac end up?
  - chongli 8y ago
    This seems more damaging to Apple than to Autodesk. I think that's very difficult for us to judge. Apple has access to far more data than we do. They may have decided that Autodesk's entire market is not worth their time. Apple is a very strange company. Even though they're among the largest companies in the entire world in terms of value, they don't operate like a large company. They shift their product teams around all the time which seems to cause some products to get neglected for a really long time.

blattimwind 8y ago

Apple: OpenGL is now discontinued on our OS. ISV: We're not going to do a special port to $proprietaryAPI of $singlepercentmarketshareOS of our x-million LOC each applications. Hackernews: Look how salty $ISV is.

oneplane 8y ago
ISV had years do to this, and when porting the first time did this for macOS-only anyway (Windows uses DirectX). Moving from OpenGL 2 to OpenGL 4 would have been just as much work as moving to Metal 2.

cesarb 8y ago

> Either they are using an engine that doesn't allow for other low level rendering options According to Wikipedia, the first version of Alias is from the 80s, and it initially ran only on IRIX. From that, I'd guess that it was initially written using IRIS GL, the predecessor of OpenGL. It probably doesn't have a separate "rendering engine"; IRIS GL and later OpenGL concepts and calls are probably strewn all over the code. Porting to anything else would probably be a significant effort.

jakobegger 8y ago

With recent releases, Apple has been breaking things every year. They remove support for Obj-C GC, 32bit apps, Open GL, they limit Apple Script, they make it hard to run unsigned code, make it harder to run certain kinds of apps, etc. Each deprecation on its own is understandable, and probably makes sense when the goal is a modern, safer OS. But when macOS is not your main target market, at some point it doesn't pay off anymore to try to keep up with the annual technology changes. If you have a big code base, those yearly modernisations are a lot of effort. And Apple doesn't make the impression that they care about things they break. I've filed a lot of bug reports with Apple for regressions, but if it's not a mainstream issue they just won't fix it. If you're lucky, you'll get a reply saying that they don't support your use case anymore. So they just break some stuff, and app developers need to find workarounds. I really understand if at some point the developer says, this isn't worth it, we'll just focus on the more profitable platform. At the price range of Autodesk, buying a new PC to run the software isn't really a big issue...

oneplane 8y ago
I suppose they somewhat directly contradict Microsoft's model where they try to keep supporting certain API and ABI compatibilities for over 20 years. As 'easy' as that is for the third party developer, it might not be the best way to handle an operating system. New insights are constantly gained, and older systems still have faults; the Microsoft model leaves you with a broken system that cannot be fixed until a major redesign, the Apple model leaves you with broken third party software that can be fixed by the developer but nobody else.

coldcode 8y ago

Guessing its probably a 32 bit app as well. Old crufty codebases are too hard to make radical changes to. I'm sure they rather keep shipping an ancient crappy codebase for huge piles of $$$ then rewrite it and have to spend money. Converting well written OpenGl to Metal is not all that hard. Converting a dreadful pile of crap to anything is.