Except I described above how it's not. I'm not sure you understand what "closed" means. If you're using GOG for DRM-free but are somehow OK with Windows DRM, that's some fairly major cognitive dissonance you've got going on there. If you want Apple to stop bugging you about OS updates, uncheck one box in the settings and you never see update notices again. No unwanted or forced updates. Apple would prefer if you only run signed apps for safety reasons, but it's easy enough to ignore that if you want. And so on. Compatibility is fine. It has less software, of course. Smaller market...not sure what else you'd expect.

That's obviously false. There wouldn't be any Mac games on GOG, Steam, itch, etc. if that were true. The only thing I can think of is that you're confusing iOS with macOS. To be clear, we're only talking Macs here, not iOS devices. iPhones never used Intel CPUs. You left out the fact that they used OpenGL until recently. The reasoning is pretty clear though: they wanted to advance from OpenGL, Vulkan kept getting dragged out, they decided to do something themselves. Personally I'd rather they waited and used Vulkan, but it's understandable why they didn't want to delay at the time.

Or perhaps, GASP! They could have used their massive employment base to contribute to the Vulkan project, instead of making an API that nobody is going to want to use since it means maintaining a third tertiary codebase.

Oh really it's not more?! I'm surprised, i thought it was definitely more

The reality is that most games are made with engines like Unity and Unreal, so as long as they produce Metal versions (and they do), few really care that much about the graphics API. Sometimes you have developers rolling their own from scratch, but it's just not that common. I'd still rather Apple at least have Vulkan in addition to Metal, however the negative impact overall has been fairly minimal.

Well, there is that MoltenVK translation layer to Metal from the Khronos Group, so.... *shrug*

It's actually lower than 8%, including desktops and laptops, it shrunk year on year globally.

I had a huion break on me. Mind you it was a damn nice product for the value. my sister owns one but after it broke I found the apple ipad portability and size of the biggest one to be very nice.

I went to look at there new stuff and it looks nice. are you familiar with there new lines of products? Huion in mention.

Last I heard it was still missing features and performance isn't ideal, but at least one game ships using it (Elder Scrolls Online), so it must be at least somewhat functional.

I don't art, I write. I just wanted to mention that there's others.

Heh, 's funny, it doesn't feel like it was that long ago that they switched from PowerPC to x86!

My Mac-using friend had just bought the latest and greatest PowerPC-based Mac a week before the announcement too! It got to the point where he had to use his shitty work laptop running XP to sync his iPhone because they dropped support for PowerPC in iTunes.


But Apple have never given a shit about backwards compatibility - This is known, and is just one of the things you have to put up with if you want to use Apple products; You march with them or get left with a very shiny doorstop.