Apple is a top-down hierarchy with ruthless business strategy. Not a value judgment; merely a fact to keep in mind when entering a business relationship with Apple.
Mike Rockwell, serves as the Vice President of the Vision Products Group. Rockwell has been instrumental in spearheading the Vision Pro project and the underlying visionOS platform. His leadership has been pivotal in advancing Apple’s spatial computing initiatives.
To think he and his team have not made intentional choices to support/advance or undermine OpenXR would be naïve in my view.
I'm sure their choices are intentional. But thats just one business unit. Apple is a huge company. And different areas have different priorities.
I agree with your point - Apple clearly wants Metal & friends to be their own thing. But the comment I was replying to above commented on Apple and standards. It didn’t mention graphics at all. I replied, discussing Apple as a whole.
Because they already have their own graphics API called Metal. Why aren't you asking Microsoft to drop DirectX and start first-party support for Vulkan?
I can empathize with Apple’s desire to get more adoption of Metal, but I predict it is an uphill battle to insist on it on platforms like spatial computing that is already having a very hard time to win adoption.
If Apple wanted Metal to be a success then they'd need Windows devices to support it, and ideally a console too (like DirectX with Xbox).
There's a lot of bad things you can say about Vulkan's market position relative to DirectX, but it's clearly more successful than Metal. More games and work applications are written in it. I don't see what Apple gains from going their own way. Maybe Vulkan will rot by committee like OpenGL once did, but that hasn't happened yet.
By the way, I am still waiting to see those toaster like games on WebGL 2.0.
VisionOS doesn't support VR gaming at a basic controller level. All it can do is the same traditional console controllers that other Apple devices support (PlayStation, Switch, Xbox, etc).
Metal vs. DirectX vs. Vulkan isn't the problem, the basic input devices and lack of interoperability with other non-graphics VR tooling/SDKs are the problem.
I know that Apple doesn't see it as a gaming device and mostly sucks at interfacing with the non-mobile gaming sphere, but if they had come out of the gate with messaging that was more like "We have built-in support for popular VR controllers, game developers can just do XYZ simple thing to port their games to VisionOS," they would have had some immediate momentum to help bolster the other select few things the device excels at.
But as it stands, nobody can make any of the kinds of abstractions you are referring to because the hardware is not capable of using the basic input devices that VR games depend on. Full stop.
Instead, prospective buyers are almost certainly comparing the Vision Pro with devices like the Meta Quest Pro and thinking "well, the Apple thing does some Apple stuff that nothing else can do, but I can't even play any occasional VR games on my Vision Pro and it's literally the most expensive headset money can buy."
The truth of the matter is that a Quest 3 can do pass-through vision, VR web content, and web browsing along with a decent selection of non-gaming apps at a tiny fraction of the cost of a Vision Pro and you don't even lose all that much due to it being less premium and advanced.
Even if we are comparing against a hypothetical $999 future Vision device where the external battery is gone and it weighs less it still doesn't compare all that well in that context. An analogy would be like if the iPhone wasn't allowed to make video calls and Android was. Maybe I don't use video calling every day but I can't justify buying a phone that doesn't have a feature like that as a concept.
IMO Apple thinks that controlling the device with just the hands and no controllers is the future. They feel like they have the iPhone all over again and that all the competitors using the metaphorical stylus and built-in keyboard are wrong. But as we found out with the iPad, sometimes a specialized input device (Apple Pencil) does serve a specific subset of customers very well to the point where it's considered a basic necessity.
And then refused to use it until the EU forced them
If you're worried about the port in a classroom environment you can use a short extension that you plug in on the device end, it will make the connection separate much easier if something unfortunate happens.
After that, I was a big fan of MagSafe, but today’s USB-C and better batteries situation solves a lot of problems that MagSafe did in a different way. It allows for you to have multiple reasonably priced chargers, so the one on your desk can be safely placed, with a short unsnaggable cable. And you can still go to meetings and take your laptop home – because you have another cable in your bag and another at home.
So these days, I barely use the MagSafe cable on my MacBook Pro.
Apple makes great things for their users when they collaborate with the industry. That's why we're concerned when they abandon standards and demand convergence on suspicious centralized cloud crap.
Is DirectX a standard? Is Playstation NDK (or whatever it's called) a standard?
Vulkan is not a "standard". It's a designed-by-committee API that arrived on the scene years after "non-standard" APIs.
So a "standard"?
Maybe I'm biased as I was involved with the standardization - but the whole point of a standard is something is legally possible to implement, communicates the needed information to the layer below, and general enough that it doesn't require specific hardware.
All boxes are checked by Vulkan? At least that was the intention.
So what if the origin of Vulkan was AMD's donation of Mantle, and the committee knocked the "hardware specific" points off - isn't that the desired result?
Better get some blankets because Apple has made significant contributions to many open standards - for example, USB-C. And, back in the day, OpenGL.
Its a mistake to think of a large company like apple as if it were a person, with their own goals and ideas. Apple is just too big for that. I mean, they have 164,000 staff. Thats big enough that "small" business units will still have thousands of people. So each area will end up creating its own culture, and have its own way of doing things.
The graphics division - these days - seems very intent on doing their own thing. But that doesn't tell us much about the rest of apple. 164 000 people is a lot of people. That's an awful lot of different opinions about open standards.