Apple M5 chip - Hackdot

Re:Apple M5 chip by gjsman-1000 on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @09:50AM (#45592543)

I think the past bit people, but unlike the PS4 transition or gaming consoles in the past (which were rarely backwards compatible), there wasn't enough cultural momentum to plow through it... leaving "don't support Apple" as a bit of a institutional memory at this point, even though the odds of another transition seem almost nonexistent. What would it even be? 128 bit? Back to x86? Notarization++? Metal 4 incompatible with Metal 1?

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Re:Apple M5 chip by coldpie on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @10:02AM (#45592747)

Yeah, I buy that, so I think we are actually agreeing with each other. The very rough backwards support story Apple has had for the past decade, which I mentioned, has made people uninterested in supporting the platform, even if they're better about it now, as you claim (though I'm unconvinced about that personally, having worked on macOS software for more than a decade).

> What would it even be? 128 bit? Back to x86? Notarization++? Metal 4 incompatible with Metal 1?

Sure, I can think of lots of things. Every macOS update when I worked in this space broke something that we had to go fix. Code signature requirements change a bit in almost every release, not hard to imagine a 10-year-old game finally running afoul of some new requirement. I can easily see them removing old, unmaintained APIs. OpenGL is actively unmaintained and I would guess a massive attack vector, not hard to see that going away. Have you ever seen their controller force feedback APIs? Lol, they're so bad, it's a miracle they haven't removed those already.

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Re:Apple M5 chip by bigyabai on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @12:25PM (#45594941)

> even though the odds of another transition seem almost nonexistent.

You see, the existence of that "almost" is already less confidence than developers have on every game console as well as Linux and Windows.

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