News Important Mac announcement

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Asteconn

Asteconn
Not a mac player but curious and interested in these sorts of things - may I have a brief rundown of the technical limitations that have caused this decision?
 

Han Zulu

Han Zulu
Shadowdancer said:
Looking at all those old unused non-pro MS Surface units, that may be untrue :p (ARM isn't really a targetable platform worth supporting though, Apple will do their custom chips with custom idiocy and tie their software to that, it also opens up more ways to make their hardware unfixable.)
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The non-pro MS surface units you mention, they're all ARM based? Besides, with Apple doing their own thing, the graphic card, sound card, etc, won't be the same as any existing hardware. They're go back to how they used to make everything specialized and proprietary. Hackingtosh only works on hardware that is compatible with the Macintosh hardware. I doubt there will be any compatible out there, even with the old ones.

But, of course there will be a lot of Intel-MacOS hackintoshes still around, for a while.
 
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Lucifera Danzig

Lucifera Danzig
Asteconn said:
Not a mac player but curious and interested in these sorts of things - may I have a brief rundown of the technical limitations that have caused this decision?
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MacOS stopped updating OpenGL at version 4.1, when Horizons needed 4.3 or higher. FDev said something about Metal (the Apple analog to DirectX) not supporting compute shaders, though looking into what Metal and Metal2 listed as features, it seems Metal did in fact support compute shaders. We never got an answer if it was because Metal's implementation of compute shaders wasn't compatible with the Cobra engine, or if they just were having trouble getting it to work (FDev said something about "alternatives to openGL" not performing well enough to go ahead on it), or something else.
 
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SpaceScania

S
I have been a Mac user since I bought my awesome cheese grater Mac Pro in 2006 (I miss that machine). Right now, I have an iMac in my home office and for certain tasks it is a great machine. For software development and productivity it is still way ahead of Windows for me. However, I am super annoyed at Apple because I have to maintain a separate PC tower just for games. Happily I play Elite on the PC. While I disagree what the Mac is dead I agree that overall desktop computing is in decline.

As for this decision I totally blame Apple. They refuse to update OpenGL on macOS and won't support Vulkan. It also doesn't help that the GPU's in the iMacs are super low-end for the money. The only machine Apple makes with a decent GPU is crazy expensive and totally non-upgradable. I can see why most gamers have a distaste for the Mac.
 

cptdavep

cptdavep
AtomicMegaNerd said:
I have been a Mac user since I bought my awesome cheese grater Mac Pro in 2006 (I miss that machine). Right now, I have an iMac in my home office and for certain tasks it is a great machine. For software development and productivity it is still way ahead of Windows for me. However, I am super annoyed at Apple because I have to maintain a separate PC tower just for games. Happily I play Elite on the PC. While I disagree what the Mac is dead I agree that overall desktop computing is in decline.

As for this decision I totally blame Apple. They refuse to update OpenGL on macOS and won't support Vulkan. It also doesn't help that the GPU's in the iMacs are super low-end for the money. The only machine Apple makes with a decent GPU is crazy expensive and totally non-upgradable. I can see why most gamers have a distaste for the Mac.
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Have you tried making a Hackintosh? I have one PC, with a Mac OS installation on one SSD which I used for work and a Windows SSD I use for gaming. It was a bit of a faff getting it working but after a few hours of pulling my hair out I have a stable machine which I've been using for about three years now and gradually upgrading as I go.
 

dannysquid

dannysquid
Janichsan said:
Aside the fact that the desktop market is were Apple started and grew, they will still need desktop Macs in the future, as their mobile devices are fine for content consumption, but not for production: You can watch a multi-million dollar blockbuster movie on it, but you cannot edit it. You can listen to the latest music albums on it, but you cannot produce them. You can play the latest battle royale match-3 clicker gacha simulator, but you cannot develop it.

And Apple knows that, as this recent statement from Tim Cook shows.
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I'm a motion graphics person and most of the graphics people I know are moving to PC because Apple seemed to have abandoned them over the past few years to concentrate on iphones etc...
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
Raises some interesting questions about Q4.

Are Mac owners entitled to PC version licences? If so, i see bootcamp as an option, or free PC licences to Mac owners if they aren't automatically entitled to them.
 

[VR] Frank_G

[VR] Frank_G
A good solution may be, to give Mac users a free Horizons pass for PC as sort of damage reduction, so they can spent the Horizons money on a windows copy for bootcamp.
At least, that would be a nice gesture, when refund is not happening and it would mean no costs for Frontier - so in some cases a win - win, while it still is a sad and bad thing for others.

I started playing on a mac, but made the jump to a gaming PC, when Horizons was announced. Nowadays i enjoy Elite in VR, so i have made my goodbye from gaming on Mac a long time ago. Still, i feel sad, for everyone who stayed by the flag-pole to the bitter end.

o7 fellow CMDRs
 
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