Apple wishes ray tracing was AI acceleration, because then they could at least ride the Nvidia valuation pump. But the truth is even less glamorous than that -

Apple wishes ray tracing was AI acceleration, because then they could at least ride the Nvidia valuation pump. But the truth is even less glamorous than that - this is a feature for the future, something for posterity. It's a well-researched field of fixed-function acceleration with multiple competitive implementations, unlike AI architectures. What's else, in 3-5 years you can bet your bottom dollar Apple will announce their CUDA alternative alongside a new Mac Pro. You can't even confidently say I'm joking since they've already done this (and subsequently depreciated it) once before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#OpenCL_1.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#OpenCL_1.0 I guess I can't blame HN for courting pedestrian takes, but man you're going to be disappointed by Apple's roadmap going forward if this is your opinion. And I say this, defending Apple, as someone that treats Tim Cook and Steve Jobs as the living and buried devil respectively. Having hardware-accelerated ray tracing is no more of a "gamer" feature than the high-impedance headphone jack is an "audiophile" feature. It is intelligent design motivated by a desire to accommodate a user's potential use-case. Removing either would be a net-negative at this point.