How exactly did it not work well? Windows is THE gaming platform for PC.

It kept a lot of commercial software off the Windows platform and left it on Workstations like SGI and DEC had. The movie houses that were rendering movies were using OpenGL on their renderfarms and its lack of availability on Windows kept windows off those desktops.

The key being that if you've got a technology that works on both server farms for production and workstations for development, you support that so that your OS is a viable candidate for the developer workstation. I don't see a Metal port coming to Linux in any reasonable way any time soon, and I don't see researchers giving up OpenCL or even OpenGL any time soon, so it just means that Apple is going to forego that business.

With the recent github purchase it gives the oddly dissonant experience of having Microsoft being the 'developer friendly' OS company and the MacOS being the 'developer hostile' OS company. Where, and this is important, support for cross platform tools determines hostility or support. I would not argue that Apple is not the best development environment for the Apple platform, or Windows for the Windows platform.

OpenGL is a real-time graphics API, not an offline render system used by renderfarms. I have never heard of movies or special effects rendered in OpenGL. The first major renderer was Renderman, the only game in town for years, and it has nothing to do with OpenGL.

You are correct. However, many in-studio tools are written in OpenGL. These tools are used to model objects and layout lighting, scenes, etc. by artists. They are written in OpenGL, usually on Linux. (Source: I work with several people who formerly built these tools for well-known studios like DreamWorks and Sony.)

Of course, but that’s not what we are discussing. The context for my comment was regarding offline rendering and render farms.

That's like saying roads are THE travel surface for cars.

... yes?

Not sure what you're saying is changing on the server -- people are going to go from not using OpenCL to not using Metal.

Everything is CUDA. Everything depends on the shitty unstable software designed by a hardware company (Nvidia). This sucks and I hope someone can disrupt it, but Apple has no influence in the field of GPU computing.

When did Apple ever have influence in the field of GPU computing.

And I work in data science and nobody is using their own laptops when you have AWS.

I didn't say they did. My claim is that Apple deprecating OpenCL is a straightforward and uninteresting thing; it's a company that has no influence on GPU computing getting out of the business of a technology that also has no influence on GPU computing.

I work in data science too, and who cares about laptops. Desktop computers with GPUs, SSDs, and a lot of RAM are what you need. You can thoroughly bling out the hardware and the entire computer will still cost less than your monthly AWS bill to access a GPU. (This is all getting pretty irrelevant to Apple, though, who doesn't make such computers.)

Whatever criticisms can justifiably be levelled against nvidia, having a bad software stack isn't one of them.

Most of the field of machine learning is irreproducible right now because you can't not use CUDA, but you can't promise that it will work the same on anyone else's computer, or that it will work six months from now.

Actually, it worked well for MS - back in the day, most of the games in the industry were done in DirectX. And to be honest, DirectX/3D was the only option if you wanted to have Vulkan-like low-level access to GPU.

Apple isn't a large gaming platform and they aren't used as server farms.

So I can't imagine this is going to hurt at all.