> Really just drives home how big of a mistake it was ignoring Vulkan for the past decade on Apple's behalf, but lord knows they won't admit that until it's too late.
They'll never admit it. They only caved on USB-C because they were legally required to. They won't cave on this, or NVidia support, or putting the charge port on the side of the mouse and not the belly, etc.
Maybe so. But they did cave on/rethink decisions around: the MagSafe adapter; butterfly switches; laptop thinness generally (but only a little); onboard HDMI/SD; touchbar controls (for now).
Not saying that means they'll immediately see the light WRT 3D graphics APIs. Just that they aren't universally hostile to revising prior decisions.
Admit what? That they had their own API before anyone even thought about Vulkan? That they have Metal running on one of the most popular platforms in the world (iOS)? That other major platforms don't support Vulkan (Xbox, Playstation; Windows supports DX and defers Vulkan support to GPU vendors)?
People were more willing to write a DirectX translation framework for Vulkan than Mac users were willing to write one for Metal. And now with Game Porting Toolkit we basically have confirmation that nothing has been stopping Mac users from playing DirectX games with DXVK besides... working Vulkan drivers.
So it would be nice to see Apple's explanation for being so insular. Especially when their "solution" is repackaged and relicensed free software that we've all been using for years.
> People were more willing to write a DirectX translation framework for Vulkan than Mac users were willing to write one for Metal.
There were significantly more games playable on Mac than for Linux for years, even after Vulkan's introduction. Apple hurt gaming on Mac by dropping 32-bit support and changing CPU architectures significantly more than any fantasy about not supporting Vulkan (which is really not supported by most major platforms, and isn't supported by game developers either).
And it wasn't some vague nebulous people willing to write a DirectX translation framework. It was Steam pursuing its business strategy (and doing an amazing job of it). Before steam not a single person could be bothered to get off their asses and do a similar job for any platform.
...games? Isn't that what we're talking about? How Apple suffers from spurning the gaming industry, and does absolutely nothing to improve the scenario?
> There were significantly more games playable on Mac than for Linux for years
> Apple hurt gaming on Mac by dropping 32-bit support and changing CPU architectures significantly more than any fantasy about not supporting Vulkan
Oh, well this is just wrong. Box86 had "solved" the x86 -> ARM translation path before Apple Silicon even existed, albeit slowly. The 32-bit depreciation was bad, but wasn't a dealbreaker for applications like WINE; there is a working codepath for WOW64 in WINE today.
Once again; the OP's post is about how they currently have games working on Linux that are flat-out unplayable on MacOS. Whether you want to blame fantasy features or not, Apple has clearly made some sort of arbitrary limitation on the userland capabilities that has stopped developers from doing this in MacOS and forced them onto Linux. Seems to me that the pretty clear difference is in the title of the article; Asahi supports Vulkan 1.3, MacOS does not.
> Before steam not a single person could be bothered to get off their asses and do a similar job for any platform.
Before Steam, there was no incentive to develop it. But people most certainly did do the same, job for multiple platforms. Codeweavers wrote several D3D translation layers over the years, WINE had multiple old and slow DX drivers (DirectX-D3DX9) that semi-worked, and even without that you could still run most titles through software acceleration.
And look; if Steam goes rogue and decides to drop support for all platforms but Android Wear, we don't really have to worry that much. The important work is upstreamed in DXVK and distributed by multiple parties, not just Valve. Frankly, the biggest advantage Valve still holds over the community is how smoothly their UI goes from clicking "play" to launching the game. I struggle to imagine a situation where Valve goes full-Monty and the community suffers for it.
I'm struggling to remember when Apple last truly cared about gaming on Macs
> How Apple suffers from spurning the gaming industry
Ah yes. Apple truly deeply suffers. In which reality?
> Oh, well this is just wrong. Box86 had "solved" the x86 -> ARM translation path before Apple Silicon even existed, albeit slowly
1. No idea what Box86 is
2. Slowly means it didn't solve it
3. The actual reality and not some fantasy is that after dropping 32bit support hundreds of games otherwise supported on Macs became unavailable/unplayable on Steam.
There were literally significantly more games available for Macs than for Linux. Even after Vulkan was released. The parity changed only after Valve released Proton(2018) and MacOS dropped support for 32-bit apps (2019).
Come on, this is not some ancient history. This happened just 5 years ago. I, a gamer, lived through it. And was basically forced to go ahead and myself a Windows PC because I couldn't game on the Mac anymore. And this had nothing to do with Metal, or Apple not supporting Vulkan.
> Asahi supports Vulkan 1.3, MacOS does not.
Neither does Xbox, or Playstation, or the iPhone. Windows only has native support for DirectX and delegates Vulkan support to the GPU vendors.
There's also Android where support became mandatory in 2019, and Switch (no idea when they added support, but I've seen people mention you should go to the native SDK and skip Vulkan for performance).
> Before Steam, there was no incentive to develop it.
Steam was released in September 2003
Vulkan 1.0 was released in February 2016
People going out of their way to root for Vulkan seem to have a very tenuous grasp on reality, or recent history, or both.
> And look; if Steam goes rogue and decides to drop support for all platforms but Android Wear
All this is beside the point, or is even orthogonal to the point. The only reason Proton exists, and works as well as it does, is because Valve sees business value in it. That's it.
Had Valve seen business value in having a translation layer for DX->Metal, we would've had it as well. They don't (for good business reasons), and the amazing opensource community bitches about Apple instead of doing the work that they couldn't be arsed to do in the first place.
Metal was released in June 2014[0], and Vulkan development started a month later, in July 2014[1].
You can interpret that in a few different ways: perhaps Khronos saw Metal's release, went "oh shit, we need to do something", and scrambled to start development of a new API over the next month. Or maybe Khronos (and Valve and others) were already talking about something new for some time before that, and only got a fire lit under themselves after Apple's Metal release. Or maybe the two aren't related at all.
Yes, it took a further two years for any kind of reasonable Vulkan support to be out there, but either way, I think it's a bit disingenuous to say Apple was a trailblazer with absolutely no peer here.
Regardless, the gaming situation on macOS is still... not great. Certainly some game developers have adopted Metal, but overall the main target is still DirectX, and I feel like contemporary/modern OpenGL (ES?) still probably leads Metal. Hell, at this point, Vulkan might have seen more general adoption than Metal has.
> Metal was released in June 2014[0], and Vulkan development started a month later, in July 2014[1].
>
> You can interpret that in a few different ways
There are no two interpretations. Metal was released before Khronos even had their "kick off meeting". The official introduction of Khronos didn't happen until 2015. Vulkan 1.0 was released in 2016.
Prior to 2014 there was no Vulkan, and no idea of Vulkan. Sevral companies (AMD among them) tried to peddle their own proprietary APIs as a potential future direction after OpenGL.
And yes, Khronos scrambled to have a modern API after both Microsoft and Apple ended up having one.
> Yes, it took a further two years for any kind of reasonable Vulkan support to be out there
No. It took two more years to just release version 1. And even in 2024 it's somewhat laughable to talk about "reasonable Vulkan support" when the major gaming platforms (Windows, Xbox, Playstation) don't support it (Windows supports DX natively, and Vulkan support is left to the whims of GPU vendors). The actual support for Vulkan is declining: https://carette.xyz/posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/
> I think it's a bit disingenuous to say Apple was a trailblazer with absolutely no peer here.
The trailblazer was Microsoft. What is disingenuous is to pretend that Vulkan was anywhere at the forefront or that Apple had to pay any attention to it, or that Apple is somehow in the wrong for not supporting it.
> Hell, at this point, Vulkan might have seen more general adoption than Metal has.
Of course it doesn't. Because iOS exists, supports Metal, and is a major gaming platform
They were the (one of the) first ones to usb-c on laptops. I don’t think they were ever planning to do usb-c on the iPhone, they had no reason to be this late.
They didn't have a technical reason to be that late, but they probably had a marketing reason -- and I don't mean "they made money by licensing Lightning." (They did, obviously, but I don't think it was raking in big bucks, at least not Apple standards.)
When the iPhone switched to Lightning from the clunky 34-pin iPod connector, a whole lot of people got pissed off with Apple and stayed pissed off with them for years. Literally years. People were convinced Apple did it just to sell more cables. So if you're Apple, and you know the history of the last time you forced everyone to buy new cables, and now you have orders of magnitude more people using your phone…you probably put this off as absolutely long as possible.
Would they have gotten there without pressure from the EU? Honestly, I think so -- I used to agree with you, but when the iPad Air, not just the Pro, went to USB-C, I changed my mind.
It wouldn't be weird if they simply picked one side and stuck with it. They put USB-C on Mac, because obviously Lightning couldn't fill the role they wanted with Thunderbolt. And then they made iPhones Lightning because... they wanted to sell IP to cable manufacturers. And they made the Magic Trackpad/Keyboard accessories use Lightning because... why again? It's just USB, it probably takes more work to make a Lightning peripheral than a USB-C one.
The more you think about MFi and Lightning design patents the harder it is to believe that they were simply being honest and sticking to their word.
When they made Lightning USB didn't even have an agreed-upon charging standard. Much less all the other requirements Apple had for the cable.
Do not try and pretend that USB was any good when Lightning was announced. And even USB-C is a mess of conflicting and confusing optional specifications.
As I understand, original Thunderbolt was mostly Intel's work, and Apple figured out how to have it with the mini-DP connector.
Later Thunderbolt is Intel doing the right thing: they took many of the features that USB-C lists as optional, and made them required for Thunderbolt specification. That's why the first M1 Macbook was Thunderbolt-capable/enabled, not fully Thunderbolt certified
Apple did USB-C on the iPad before the Europeans forced them to do USB-C at all. They could have kept developing Lighting, it supported USB-3 speeds for one device (the first iPad Pro), but they instead chose to rally around the common standard. USB-C on phones was a certainty, it was clear to everyone. The problem is not that Apple didn't want to standardize, it's that they didn't want to be forced.
In the history of technology, Apple has chosen to switch connectors countless times. Every single time people complain, and every time Apple has the same exact reason for choosing a specific connector: its the one that makes sense for its customers when the device is released.
> it supported USB-3 speeds for one device (the first iPad Pro)
I'm always unsure about this because it only supported USB 3 host for one specific accessory, the camera adapter. I question whether that implementation was just a hack or something that could've scaled to proper USB client support and others.
There was never a USB 3 Lightning to USB-A or USB-C cable.
Speaking of, can you buy a Magic Trackpad that uses USB-C yet? I've got a Magic Trackpad 2 that requires this annoying special cable no one uses and it ends up making me buy trashy gas-station connectors to feed it power.
Maybe we're still waiting for that one to make "sense for it's customers when the device was released". Good grief.
They'll never admit it. They only caved on USB-C because they were legally required to. They won't cave on this, or NVidia support, or putting the charge port on the side of the mouse and not the belly, etc.