Hello everyone!

...hhhmmmm....This news seems to follow exactly the usual "habit" of Apple.

And usually I react to news like this, with words like "Damn Apple...f...ck....@#!! sh..it" and so on :)

BUT...THIS TIME, AND FOR THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT, HONESTLY I TOTALLY AGREE WITH APPLE.

I'm software developer for decades, and for many years I have a very personal point of view about modern "consumer" computer science.

And it's something similar to what, some days ago, Tim Cook said at WWDC 2018 (not literally) : Now it's the time of the software rather than hardware.

What I want to say is : What's the point in having tons and tons of super powerful hardware, like all modern PC/Tablet/Smartphone, if with these things we still can't do what this hardware could do?

Let me describe the situation with a couple of simple, negative, examples and with only one positive example...

The negative ones.

A) I have a very good PC. OK, not a true workstation, but anyway a very good desktop PC.
Equipped with a fairly good i7-7700k 4.5 Ghx, 32GB of very fast DDR4 3000Mhz Ram, and (only in theory) a super monster GPU card : the Gtx 1080 Ti with a "firepower" of 11.3 TFlops in FP32!!!!

Well...I have no words to see how BAD, fucking BAD, are the Nvidia drivers that manage that super hardware.
And, I have no words again too see how, almost ALL the software I use every day, with a very few and rare exceptions (Moi for example), are "done slapdash"!!!

B) One of the worst implementation of the entire software history, is without doubt, the very terrible OpenGL and OpenCL implementation that many, so many, computer graphic software, have!!!! Terrible to see how tons of (also very famous) software, rely on very poor implementation of that libraries.


WHY I HAVE BOUGHT A GTX 1080 TI OR WHY SOMEONE COULD SPEND 6000 USD FOR A QUADRO P6000 IF THEIR UNDERLYING GFX ROUTINES ARE SO WEAK AND "OUTDATED" ?

I repeat, OpenGL implementations, for decades, is one the worst piece of software of the entire computer science history!

Now the the positive example :

About one year ago I purchased for the very first time an Apple device, the iPad Pro 12.9 second generation, with the Apple Pencil.

BEFORE CONTINUING, I HAVE TO SAY THAT I DON'T LOVE APPLE MACHINES OR APPLE SOFTWARE/OS AND I'M NOT AN APPLE FUN.

But I decided to buy an iPad Pro because it has an incredible power when it comes to create digital paintings/drawings.
Actually is still the very best device for that kind of work. And in fact I use my iPad Pro 99% of the time only for digital painting.

WELL...AS IT SO HAPPENS, ACTUALLY THE VERY BEST AND "STATE OF THE ART" APPS FOR DIGITAL PAINTING, FIRST AND FOREMOST "PROCREATE" FOLLOWED BY "ARTSTUDIO PRO", WERE TOTALLY REWRITTEN FROM OPENGL TO METAL!!!
And, believe me, those Apps, above all Procreate, really FLY!!!!!
It's incredible to see what the software developers of these two Apps were able to obtain from the METAL api!!!!
If you have, just once, used one of that Apps you should know what I'm talking about.
And with a device that has only 4GB of Ram (3.88 free to be precise)

So...Apple want to force all the Apps to move from the "weak" and "old" OpenGL to METAL ?
I totally agree.

Software, rather than (wasted) hardware.

My very personal opinion.

Ciao!

Marco (mkdm)