I belong to the pro market, but I love video games. I am eager to hear some details around how they view Macs in the gaming world.
The limited gaming available on a 5k iMac was great while I had one. Civilization, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft... Jaw dropping, but barely scratching the surface of what Apple could do if they gave some love to the market.
Safari is probably the best bet Mac has for Gaming at the moment. As someone who has to update games which Apple breaks with every Mac release... it's the most brutal platform. If you thought linux audio was tough... try delivering games on a Mac that you don't want to break with the next update.
"But can't everyone just implement our Metal API? It's been so successful, it's the best, you'll love it" No. No we don't love it. Please just implement WebGL2. Thanks.
"But we neglected OpenGL for years, even though our pro users have been begging for updates, and we think Metal is the best, you'll love it".
No. We want OpenGL updates. We are pros, and you promised us for years OpenGL updates. This is why there are almost 0.0% of our apps released on Macos with Metal.
"But we released the new macbook pro with an AMD card. We haven't really been working on OpenCL, but use that. You'll love it".
No, we want CUDA. We are pros, and we told you we wanted CUDA. It's what we use, because you stopped caring about OpenCL.
"I know we said we were serious about pro models, and that there would be a new mac pro, but here is the same one with a minor update. You'll love it. It's the best."
Metal and OpenCL frankly feel like something Microsoft would do. Advertise a custom whiz bang API and then quietly drop it after 3-5 years due to churn in middle management fiefdoms.
You are comparing apples with oranges here. Metal and OpenCL are different technologies. OpenCL is cross platform and an open specification while Metal is used only on macOS and iOS.
Apple has no market dominance in the graphics/compute domain and they want people to spend time and energy porting to a locked-in proprietary API when they haven't even had success getting people to use cross-platform open APIs like OpenGL/CL? Madness.
I have OpenGL code running on FreeBSD, Linux, MacOS X and Windows. I'm not going to write a second implementation for Apple systems. Vendor-specific graphics APIs are a throwback to the '90s. I am categorically not going to support Apple's Metal API; they need to bear in mind that much software using OpenGL is not Mac-specific, and given the poor state of Mac graphics Macs are decreasingly a second class platform for serious graphics use. Even FreeBSD has better OpenGL support(!)
"Market power" is fairly meaningless when you support multiple platforms. Most games ported to Apple platforms use OpenGL; using Metal would restrict their market significantly. And expensive high-end software has better support on platforms where you can use expensive high-end GPUs and compute, and that's not today's Apple hardware. Metal is a non-starter for a very large number of people, and they need to get their OpenGL and Vulkan support up to par or many of us will cease supporting Apple platforms entirely.
This is shortsighted attitude that, in the long run, will be toxic for Apple. It's one thing to not give developers what they want because you can't ( doesn't fit the technology or the product, don't have the resources or whatever). It is quite another to do that simply because you won't (e.g. for strategic lock-in reasons).
Yes, the iPhone gives them all the market power they need with some developers, even many devlopers. But others don't care about the iPhone for various reasons. Those developers, grumble, moan and eventually buy computers that aren't Macs. And when those developers make great things they're outside of Apple's ecosystem, encouraging other developers and customers to leave it as well...
They've already lost a lot of high end UI, video, and game developers. Pretty sure they're going to lose the mass market audio developers on this android release. I guess audio latency is good enough now for many audio apps... and that's where all the users are (well, in a year after upgrades they will be). A lot of the existing apps have updated to use the new low latency APIs.
Im on a 2015 5K iMac, one thing that does annoy is the very slow release of Apple sanctioned drivers for Bootcamp.
You have to use http://www.bootcampdrivers.com/ to have any chance of playing BF1 for example.
Most games are playable on medium gfx settings.
The limited gaming available on a 5k iMac was great while I had one. Civilization, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft... Jaw dropping, but barely scratching the surface of what Apple could do if they gave some love to the market.