15 ms·

"Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal funding. It’s a little awkward that we beat the big corporation…" Love the euphemism. This puts A

• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• jolux 3y ago
  Apple ended up in a battle with a patent troll over FaceTime, which could be part of why it hasn’t been opened up.
  • seeknotfind 3y ago
    Lol. It's intentionally closed, so network effects can drive usage. Common Apple strategy, straight from Jobs.
    • jolux 3y ago
      Jobs is the guy who claimed they were going to make it an open standard originally.
      • selectodude 3y ago
        Jobs just added that to the keynote presentation after running it past nobody.
        • jolux 3y ago
          He was the CEO, if he wanted it done it would have happened.
      • izacus 3y ago
        Jobs also repeatedly lied and backstabbed his business partners when he thought he gained an advantage. As we see here.
    • KerrAvon 3y ago
      Yes, Jobs, the great satan of tech. He died so that Tim Apple could sin with impunity. No FaceTime for Windows users — it will bring the rebels to their knees.
      • astrange 3y ago
        https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619
        • seeknotfind 3y ago
          I can't believe it. I can't believe it. Wow. Alright, now we're getting somewhere.
  • behnamoh 3y ago
    I'm just glad we now have much better alternatives to FaceTime that Apple will soon have no choice but to open up.
• Buttons840 3y ago
  Sometimes I think the biggest secret in this industry is that 2 people can outproduce even the largest companies. The only thing keeping everyone's job secure is that nobody can accurately identify which 2 people.
  • misterbishop 3y ago
    A rational economic system would eliminate the distinction between education and production so that people are constantly learning/improving while occasionally contributing to massive breakthroughs. We systemically under-develop every single human being on a global basis right now.
    • nxobject 3y ago
      Everyone deserves an experience like that, at the very least – everyone deserves to be in a position where they have the opportunity to really enquire, or engineer, or know what it's like to solve new problems. It really is a good purpose that education could meet.
      • Buttons840 3y ago
        I'm frustrated that "good management" involves breaking things down so small that there is no room for enquiry or engineering. Jira ticket #5229 "Port get_order_* API" doesn't leave much room for problem solving.
        • azinman2 3y ago
          It’s almost like business needs come first
          • Buttons840 3y ago
            Is there a world where we put people's needs first?
    • Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
• europeanNyan 3y ago
  I agree with you completely and yet it's practically impossible finding a worthwhile alternative. I've tried finding alternatives on my last upgrade cycle and it's like having to live with endless amounts of compromises just to get away from Apple. For the iPhone, I tried looking at the Pixel for the Vanilla Android experience and long support, yet it seems like people are fighting battery life issues all the time. Not to mention the polish of the software, app ecosystem and stability. Also, couldn't find anything coming near the value of a baseline Macbook Air M1 as far as build quality, battery life, stability etc. is concerned. I like to also read comics and magazines on the iPad and that's also a market where I have no idea what an alternative would be. And that's the state of the tablet market for years now. Maybe I could get rid of my Apple Watch, but it just works and has endless amounts of third party accessories. I've been looking at Fossil Hybrid Smartwatches and it seems like they are a hot mess of instability and bad support. At the end of the day, it's about stability and ease of use. I'm way past the time where I had the time and found it really cool to try every new ROM coming out ("daily driver", "What isn't working? You tell me") and it seems like Apple still can't be beat at this front. Sadly.
  • eru 3y ago
    > Also, couldn't find anything coming near the value of a baseline Macbook Air M1 as far as build quality, battery life, stability etc. is concerned. The ThinkPads are pretty good laptops, especially if you put Linux on them.
    • selectodude 3y ago
      My brand new work thinkpad is total garbage compared to my two year old MacBook Pro. Only laptop where I need to use an external mouse.
      • lostdog 3y ago
        Agreed. I got a gen10 thinkpad (with Linux). The power supply makes a crackling noise. After 6 months the fan starting making grinding. The screen flickers when the CPU is loaded, and once a week the whole thing just locks up. Worst laptop I've owned.
• michelb 3y ago
  How did they beat the big corp who probably didn’t even have this on the agenda? Or any other big corp that wasn’t planning on doing this? I’m all for it but they clearly did something someone else wasn’t willing or even planning to do.
• bastardoperator 3y ago
  Genuine question. Why would apple make a driver for something they don't support? and if they wouldn't, is there really any shame?
  • asddubs 3y ago
    well, the article mentions webgl
• KerrAvon 3y ago
  Apple themselves tell you to use Metal instead of OpenGL on Apple platforms. It’s not beating the big corporation if the big corporation isn’t in the competition.
  • surajrmal 3y ago
    Agreed. It's a misrepresentation. Apple doesn't do it because it's too hard, they don't do it because they don't see value in doing it.
    • twoodfin 3y ago
      They probably see alternatives as providing negative value vs. total clarity from the platform owner re: how to use the GPU.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• CharlesW 3y ago
  > They obviously don't care about standards… Apple has invented, contributed to, and adopted a long list of standards. You can easily Google or ChatGPT the list if you don't know your tech history. Apple deprecated OpenGL and OpenCL support in 2018 for very reasonable technological and strategic reasons that I understand you disagree with. But that doesn't change the fact that OpenGL is a terrible fit for modern computing/GPU architectures.
  • astrange 3y ago
    Apple also invented and contributed OpenCL. Then later Khronos invented OpenGL compute shaders, which is completely different.
• Jasper_ 3y ago
  It's because OpenGL is a dying specification based on an outdated, horrible programming model, and Khronos's conformance tests are weird and ridiculous. The conformance tests are not open-source (there's a separate "conformance suite" available on GitHub which is based on Google's dEQP, not the Khronos internal test suite), and there can be some pretty major bugs and gaps in your implementation while still getting it "certified standards-compatible". Apple has committed to support for OpenGL 3.1, and that's it. They even rewrote their OpenGL driver for Apple M1 to be an emulation layer on top of Metal, so that existing applications keep working, but they're not going to implement any newer versions of OpenGL. Nor should they. I have a lot of criticisms of Apple, and I think they could be doing a lot to make Metal a better API with better tooling, but not caring about OpenGL is a perfectly sane decision here.
  • ferbivore 3y ago
    For GLES all the relevant tests are open-source, under KhronosGroup/VK-GL-CTS on GitHub. There's a small set of legacy "confidential" tests that you have to pass for GL conformance. They can't be open-sourced for legal reasons. The current CTS working group would like to get rid of them, but it's hard to justify spending time on GL these days... You can definitely pass conformance with a driver that's horribly broken in practice. GL/ES/GLSL are huge and there are holes found in these specs all the time. And it's not like game developers read them anyway; whatever works on their test devices gets shipped.
• doctorpangloss 3y ago
  These two are tremendously cool. The story seems really complicated from a technical point of view. Whom is OpenGL ES 3.1 compliance for? Apple is shipping DirectX compatibility in Game Porting Toolkit. I understand you are making a stylized comment. My stylized comment is, there's a lot of stuff going on everywhere, all the time, with all sorts of technologies. You're not illuminating for me, compared to all the other people toiling in obscurity, what about this has pressed so many buttons for the Hacker News audience? Because it's not OpenGL ES 3.1 compliance.
• Aurornis 3y ago
  > This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple. They obviously don't care about standards, or compliance, because they like people to be walled in their own little private garden Is everyone missing the part where Apple left the door open for other operating systems and development thereof when it would have been relatively trivial for them to lock the laptops down. They literally made their own silicon and built an entire platform. Do you think it's a mere mistake that they left it open to running other operating systems? It's really disappointing to see everyone bashing Apple when it's clear to anyone paying attention that they made a conscious decision to leave the door open for 3rd party development.
  • baby_souffle 3y ago
    > It's really disappointing to see everyone bashing Apple when it's clear to anyone paying attention that they made a conscious decision to leave the door open for 3rd party development. Maybe I'm just a jaded grey-beard but I suspect that this is more of a "placate the anti-trust regulators" play and not a genuine olive branch offering. Apple gets to say "see, look! Not only are we not locking people out - there's a whole micro-niche community that's taken root. If that isn't proof we're not abusing our position, I don't know what is..." They left the door open, but just barely. The reverse engineering efforts will always be a step behind making sure that there's always going to be a "non-apple" experience that will be objectively inferior in one way or another.
    • klausa 3y ago
      I can’t imagine any reasonable argument that would make Apple be a target for an anti-trust action for _Macs_. I understand skepticism and not always giving corporations the benefit of the doubt, but they _clearly_ spent a lot of time and resources to make third-party OSes viable on Apple Sillicon Macs.
      • dlivingston 3y ago
        > _clearly_ spent a lot of time and resources to make third-party OSes viable on Apple Sillicon Macs. This actually isn't clear to me -- can you explain? Besides keeping an open bootloader [0], I'm not aware of any affirmative actions Apple has taken. [0]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Open-OS-Ecosystem-on-Apple-Silicon-Macs https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Open-OS-Ecosystem-on...
• sharts 3y ago
  They learned from Microsoft in the 90’s.
• thatfrenchguy 3y ago
  OpenGL(ES) are basically old legacy APIs at this point, it’s not too surprising that Apple won’t invest in them besides existing app conpatibility right?
• mirekrusin 3y ago
  If Apple didn't care, they wouldn't release anything at all. But they did. It means somebody did care. But they failed, got beaten by almost one-man-army "team" that started running miles behind from another country behind chain of mountains. It's unreal. It's unreal because Apple has everything - talent, hardware and software and got beaten by reverse engineering the whole thing. Such a slap in a face.
  • Salgat 3y ago
    We're kidding ourselves if we think Apple was putting an earnest effort into this.
    • zer0zzz 3y ago
      They don’t remotely care about supporting a standards complaint graphics api. It’s an anti-feature, the opposite of what they want (I worked there for a bit on gpus). If I had to guess the two things they care about it’d be 1) their own ecosystem (ie metal) and 2) what’s popular for game devs (ie hlsl dx and windows). So far that’s seems to be what they’ve been working towards shipping.
• jasoneckert 3y ago
  I've been watching the Asahi Linux project from the beginning from the sidelines. I find it both exciting and fascinating for two reasons: 1) It's a project that a lot of people want to see happen, and 2) It's a stellar example of a well-executed open source project at all levels. Moreover, Asahi has been my daily driver since the alpha was released back in March 2022. I migrated to Fedora Asahi Remix (their new flagship distro) earlier this month, which is excellent (https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/fedora-asahi-remix/ https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/fedora-asahi-remix/).
• intrasight 3y ago
  > If i weren't an iOS dev, i would have ran away I used to wonder why anybody who is not an iOS developer would buy a Mac. Now I just accept that some people make different choices than I would - just with most everything in life.
  • freehorse 3y ago
    If somebody makes a laptop as energy efficient as an apple silicon macbook, while being more serviceable, running linux etc, I will gladly buy that one. I am definitely not staying in apple for Macos.
  • zer0zzz 3y ago
    Go into any Bay Area coffee shop and you’ll see it’s filled to the brim with zoomer developers developing their apps and projects on a Mac. Doesnt matter at this point why or how but it’s more or less become the standard development platform for a lot of stuff, or at the very least the frontend for it.
• jmull 3y ago
  I just don't see how it's incumbent on Apple to implement a standard only because it exists. It takes significant resources and impacts release schedules to, say, support an on-going vulkan implementation... I think there would need to be a business argument for it. Avoiding "shame" probably doesn't cut it. It just strikes me as strange when people expect Apple to spend money and focus on their own personal priorities... especially for things that are inherently community-driven. Perhaps there's a "community goodwill" argument to make, though I doubt they'll try to chase the goodwill of people who complain that Apple "has become is just a corrupted mess of greed behind a curtain of politically correct marketing videos."
  • atoav 3y ago
    > I just don't see how it's incumbent on Apple to implement a standard only because it exists. I mean it isn't. But it would be nice if they supported at least any graphics standard.
  • Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
    Developers don't want to create seperate Apple only backends for everything. Users want to use software, they don't care about what backend is used. When Apple has to personally implement a metal backend for blender, it's obvious that there is a problem. This is despite blender being one of the most well-funded open source projects. Having to support multiple backends also increases development time and future tech-debt surface area. It's mostly not a moral arguemt as you seem to imply. This is just a feature that developers and users want. Apple is free to not implement it. It just means that many apps will not support Apple, or they will support it at the cost of other features, or they will use MoltenVK.
  • Dinux 3y ago
    What? I'd argue the graphics APIs are one of the most important interfaces right now. It's not that we all feel good if apple would adhere to standards for once, it's supporting a legacy of applications that have been build over the last 20 years or so. Allowing a platform to be used however the rest of the industry has been evolving, not cheap vendor locking
  • phkahler 3y ago
• mmaunder 3y ago
  Yep. Just switched to PC for Davinci Resolve renders/exports and built a threadripper 64 core with 128G of RAM, 16 TB of SSD, dual RTX 4090 GPUs and dual thunderbolt 4 ports with awesome cooling for $15K. Something worse from Apple would cost you three times that and be less serviceable.
  • labcomputer 3y ago
    I’m curious how that is possible, considering that a fully maximal configuration of a Mac Pro (which including pre-installed FCP and Logic) costs less than $13k.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• kelnos 3y ago
  > This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple. Not really? Like, we can look at this and point fingers, but Apple will not be ashamed, because they do not care. They deliberately don't bother with standards conformance unless doing so is a part of their strategy. Standards conformance for OpenGL or Vulkan doesn't make sense when they want everyone to use Metal. It's dumb, and I marvel at how childish Apple always behaves with things like this, but that's just who they are.
• amelius 3y ago
  > If i weren't an iOS dev, i would have ran away from the apple ecosystem a long time ago. Yeah, instead of drivers for M1, I'd be more impressed+happy if someone implemented the iOS APIs running on Linux, like we have Wine for Windows on Linux.
  • Cloudef 3y ago
    https://www.darlinghq.org/ https://www.darlinghq.org/
    • amelius 3y ago
      Did anyone use this to write iOS apps under Linux?
• MBCook 3y ago
  > This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple But Apple clearly has zero interest in OpenGL. Thats been obvious since before the M series chips. What they’ve done so far and continue to do is incredible. I love following what the Asahi team has done. But anyone can win a “race” against an opponent who refuses to play. Shame Apple for not playing the game if you want, but they could have easily done this if they wanted to.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• dclowd9901 3y ago
  What does Apple get from not making their laptops the most performant portable gaming machines out there?
  • realusername 3y ago
    They lost the gaming market a while ago so they don't care anymore. The gaming situation on a Mac is worse now than 10 years ago.
• Affric 3y ago
  You say that but the financial barrier to entry for using Facetime and iMessage mean I have not once received spam. That's a real feature in the modern day. Apple are by no means perfect but over pretty much every other service (shout out to Mastodon being too small to bother with I presume) I have used I have received spam. Advocates of truly neutral carriers, open code, et cetera, et cetera, so on and so forth don't really have an answer to spam in my experience. I would say that almost no one has an answer to spam except seemingly Apple. And while their answer sucks it is an answer. In the modern world telecommunications are a requirement to participate in society. I don't think it's unreasonable to have spam be your number one concern. It's a waste of my existence even though I ignore all of it and take appropriate pro social actions by using whatever kind of report I have available to me. There are people who fall for the scams (I have met and even know a few) and they have lost heaps of money. Apple would be destroying a huge amount of value for their users were they to open up their service more easily to spammers. It's not our job to give up our lives so someone's theoretical version of a better society can exist. I say this with every bit of code I have ever published being GPL3 and having advocated it in every single project I have ever worked on. But I have never built a telecommunications platform.
  • anon-3988 3y ago
    > Advocates of truly neutral carriers, open code, et cetera, et cetera, so on and so forth don't really have an answer to spam in my experience. Seems trivial by but allowing anyone to message anyone else unless they exchanged their contacts physically (by showing each others QR code or something).
    • Affric 3y ago
      Right, aside from friction for users, spammers will attempt to find ways around any system you implement. They are malicious actors. I don't think protecting a system against malicious actors is trivial.
• VeejayRampay 3y ago
  putting apple to shame implies that they have some form of honour, which is clearly not the case, they don't care