Apple wants you to buy your games through the App Store, so they can take the 30%, which means competing with Steam. Which means getting licensed games on the App Store.
Apple already fought one such license war over music and won. They're currently doing Apple TV as well.
However, for the gaming industry they're complete strangers. Unlike music (which is mostly made on Mac) and TV/Movies (which are often made on Mac, at least partly), gamedev is very much Windows focused.
Pushing for ports and licenses is an uphill battle, and probably not one Apple wants to take on. They have plenty of other profitable ventures.
Especially in the last few years, preservation has been a big topic. Gamers want their purchases to keep working in the future, not being broken by an OS update as it often happens with macOS (compared to Windows)
I think you’re responding to “gaming” and thinking of AAA titles which are flashy and splashy but are a smaller market than mobile games. I guess gp might have been thinking of mobile or casual where Apple does have a significant stake and interest but no appreciable focus.
I'm thinking of gaming as in Steam, including indies, AA and AAA.
Of course Apple is doing perfectly fine for mobile gaming, and is giving more than enough tools to developers to implement mobile games perfectly well.
I am talking about PC gaming, and more specifically modern DXVK/Wine support. There's no need for ports, as the Steam Deck showed.
Apple Silicon GPUs are all capable of supporting Vulkan 1.3 and translating DirectX code. Proton 11 supports ARM/FEX natively, which would make Apple Silicon a first-class citizen if you use Asahi drivers. macOS users will be stuck with Game Porting Toolkit and it's lackluster support; iPad/AppleTV/iPhone users have no options whatsoever, presumably to redirect their attention to the App Store that Apple profits from so handsomely.
This is entirely a misleading point. DXVK, Wine and Proton are full of patches that exist to support individual games.
It is not just a translation layer, as much as a great effort of the open source community to force-port every game in existence to Linux. The effort also includes stuff like ntsync that gives the Linux kernel Windows-y APIs for performance.
I doubt Apple has any interest in any of that. I don't really blame them.
And purely in principle, why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
That is the point. Valve is maintaining the patches; Apple has to do nothing besides support compliant Vulkan 1.2+ drivers (which their community already does).
Apple doesn't need to implement ntsync to support Proton or DXVK, either. macOS' synchronization primitives do the job just as well as esync or fsync does.
> why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
Because Apple doesn't support OS-independent APIs. They also don't support old runtimes, so users will inevitably have to run the Windows version once the native code breaks.
Valve ported several of their games natively to macOS, and almost every single one of them is broken on modern Macs. Valve didn't change the game tech, it's all runtime breakage.
From what I understand you're saying that Apple should provide 2 things: (1) Vulkan drivers and (2) backwards compatibility forever.
I don't really know enough about graphics to discuss point (1). From what I understand, Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly, and the Asahi Vulkan drivers are significantly less performant than Metal (how much of that is due to beta/community status vs. architectural bottleneck I have no idea).
But let's say they provide (1).
Providing (2) would simply be a big mistake. It is a huge mistake of Windows, of the C++ programming language and of the x86 ISA (none of which are very good). Linux distros do not provide this either, beyond the core kernel syscalls and glibc. It is certainly a very big ask and not something trivial.
I'm only asking for (1); Apple can keep breaking APIs forever as long as they support the libraries that enable Proton.
(2) is precisely the reason why nobody can port games to macOS anymore, and largely why ARM is a second-class citizen in PC gaming too. You cannot depreciate things like AVX or 32-bit library execution modes, and then demand native builds get made to 20-year-old games. Apple Silicon's ISA extensions like AMX are not a replacement for x86's SIMD extensions, it's not standardized through Arm or supported in Asahi either. Native Mac games need to incorporate Apple's proprietary and unstable tech like Metal and the Apple Silicon microarchitecture, which makes their games unstable and difficult to support in the long term. Translation is Apple Silicon's only choice for game preservation and mainstream game support.
> Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly
This is a misconception that stems from Metal's preference for tile-based deferred rendering pipelines. Vulkan 1.3 is fully viable on the M1 onward, which is enough to support DirectX 12 translation in Proton. The performance of Asahi's drivers are not any worse than the official Vulkan drivers that Arm provides for TBDR-optimized GPUs like the Mali line.
Games should simply not be written for a particular architecture. The rendering part of the game engine should already be abstracted away from the particular rendering API (there are other significant platforms which do not support Vulkan: PS5 and Xbox, which your game should be capable of targeting). And the math library should have fallbacks to standard C (or standard C++ etc.) and then specialized implementations for AVX, NEON, SVE, etc.
Nothing else needs to be architecture specific.
Now, sure, NEON is slower than AVX-256/512. But backending to NEON or even standard C is certainly going to be faster than running stuff over an x86-to-ARM translation layer.
Sooner or later the Steam Deck 2 will release, probably on an ARM platform (if the Steam Frame compatibility layers go well), and millions upon millions upon millions of dollars of electricity will simply be wasted running x86-to-ARM, Win32-to-Linux and Direct3D-to-Vulkan dynamic compatibility layers when, if the games were well written in the first place, they could simply be trivially recompiled.
> 32-bit library execution modes
If your application assumes pointers are 32-bits, or any particular size, or even any set of particular sizes, it's completely broken.
As for (1), if Asahi Vulkan drivers are really good, that just goes to show why Apple isn't supporting Vulkan. Metal applications seem to be faster, and Apple wants to push devs to make their apps for the faster API.
For casual kids gaming, Apple TV and Apple Arcade is a fantastic combo. It's been plenty enough to keep my kid occupied, using hardware I already owned.
I've recently switched to a Mac after years on Linux, basically due to my frustration with the way the Linux desktop is being developed and the lack of quality all around for that platform.
Overall, it's an absolute joy.
It just works extremely well.
Like any new platform it has its fair share of quirks and inexplicable behavior. My two biggest pet peeves are magic interactions that are very useful, but I don't know how to repeat (my recent downloads file things disappeared from by dock on the last reboot), and extremely missable interactions (apps asking for the permission to send notifications is an extremely missable notification that you have to hover over -> Options -> Allow).
However, at the end of the day, these are all things I can learn. A few I can change with Vorssaint.
The issues with Windows and desktop Linux are much much deeper than that.
Meta-topic: I've seen this comment many times over the years, and it never results in a discussion where folks can agree. My reaction reading it is "You must be holding it wrong!" because I daily-drive Linux in many more ways than one (servers, laptops, desktops, handhelds (Hackberry Pi), SBCs, and, Valve-willing, VR headsets), and adore the Linux desktop. I use Pop!_OS almost everywhere, but Debian/Ubuntu/Arch with IceWM or Fluxbox (or the like) works great.
Anyway, this is not a call for you to start listing all the stuff that's broken (though feel free!), I'm just amazed that, with years of power and freedom on Linux, you truly enjoy Mac more. Just goes to show each of us has our own workflow and tastes!
It's a bit deeper than just a series of bugs. For all of Linux's power and freedom, its modern desktop architecture is extremely restrictive.
* There is only one systemd --user session per user with one D-Bus instance. So you can only have one desktop instance active at a time.
* There is no way for privileged apps/scripts to generically control the desktop or other apps in Wayland. (so no accessibility, AI computer use or even general scripting)
* There is no differentiation between configuration that should be active on (user, machine) tuple, and configuration that should be active on (user, *) tuple. (even Windows gets this right!)
* Desktop apps do not report rich activity information so they cannot be smartly memory managed.
* Desktop apps cannot generally be restored after getting killed/system shutdown.
* No application identity, PIDs voluntarily take on application identities in Wayland and on D-Bus, but PIDs that don't can easily escape observability, and if they consume resources but not enough to show up high in top, good luck knowing about them.
As technical as I am, none of those items really matter to me at all. So it's a great illustration of how the long tail of user needs is what ends up differentiating us in these discussions. It's very rare to get deep enough to actually identify that. I've always treated the desktop like a second-class citizen on Linux with the command line being my primary interface, and that has adapted so well to agentic usage that it never even occurred to me that desktop tool use was missing.
Which is an interesting assertion by itself, since I have a local deep-seek model that routinely uses scripting to fire up servers, browsers, take screenshots, and assess how it's converging on a solution. I'm sure there's a long discussion to be had about how all of that is just a dirty hack, but for my purposes, it's been working excellently.
Same for me and I don't use MacOS for the same reason some people don't use Linux, I find the UI lacking and confusing.
And more importantly, MacOS (like Windows) are still poorly translated compared to your average Linux desktop with some leftover always in English. It's okay for me as a software engineer but it's not acceptable enough to give to my parents.
I find that the people who are most concerned about circular financing in the case of AI, are those who fearmonger about deflation and talk about the importance of monetary velocity for the economy.
I'm not saying this situation is different from all of the other technological paradigm shifts in history.
But what concerns me is that authors of articles such as this feel no need to differentiate themselves from other anti-technology arguments in history.
Depends on what you mean by correct. Do you think the world would be better if those anti-technology people succeeded and the technologies did not come to be?
A world without steam engines, cars, computers, printing presses.
Possibly for some things and possibly not for others. It's hard to say. The upsides and downsides are very apples-and-oranges.
The point isn't that the world would be objectively better in every case, but rather that the arguments of "anti-technology people" are frequently rational (and often don't even necessitate an elimination of the technology in question), and using their name as a cudgel as if they were cavemen is a low-quality rhetorical trope haunting all conversation about writing that is critical of AI.
It's also a distraction. If the topic is AI, then it's better to simply talk about the ups and downs of AI than the ups and downs of e.g. cars.
Predictions and prescriptions are different things. E.g. they said that recorded music would cause fewer people to sing and perform in their own homes. This happened, but we're all largely just fine with it.
I think it is very much different. Previous revolutions allowed us to fall back from manual labour to more mental driven work. Now even this is not going to be an option. Soon we're going to be reduced to be useful for spare parts only.
This is only the case for the Industrial Revolution.
There have been many other thinking technologies and they ALL have been attacked in exactly the same way.
* Socrates attacked the invention of writing, arguing it would make people intellectually lazy.
* Abbot Johannes Trithemius argues in "In Praise of Scribes" in the 15th century that the Gutenberg machine would make people intellectually lazy.
* Lots of people in the 1960s attacked punch card computers, and automation in general (!), on the basis that it would make people intellectually lazy.
* Nicholas Carr attacks Google in a famous article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", on the basis that it would make people intellectually lazy.
And so on and so on and so on.
"That which has been is what will be, And there is nothing new under the sun."
It is because of this history that any argument such as the author makes, arguing that AI would make people intellectually lazy, must start already from the lamentation of the downfall of human intelligence from the days of Socrates, or must explain why this is different.
It is obviously not different.
There are three mental skills being offloaded onto AI:
1. Domain-specific skills
2. General intelligence (g)
3. Recall
Of these three, the danger with 1 is offloading them too early, before the AI is "good enough" to be better than human experts. This is a genuine concern and we should do things carefully. However, if the AI is good enough, there is no danger here.
Recall is the mental skill that all of these innovations have "hurt", but it can simply be trained explicitly and synthetically. We will certainly have to structure our societies more and more in the future to synthetically exercising recall (like we're now synthetically exercising our muscles), but if we do this, offloading recall at work is not a big issue.
As for general intelligence, this is the most harmless to offload, because, as far as I know from the literature, it cannot really be trained, and it does not really degrade either.
"If AI is good enough there is no danger" ?? Who's going to be validating the AI expertise after the experts are gone? Another AI? This is a downward spiral into oblivion and worst case, obsolescence.
The way the transformers work, getting to the point 1 will probably never be possible - more likely that the capital will just say it is good-enough "in the name of profits" and legislate to protect AI companies against any litigation from AI made mistakes. To a certain extent it is happening already - and all the IP and Copyright theft for model training has been brushed aside already. Yes there are few odd lawsuits here and there but they will be inconsequential and soon forgotten.
Recall is already being massively affected. I see it in our teams at work and I am also affected myself to a point. I very much doubt there will be a massive restructure of societies to allow us to work our brains out - mental gyms. They do exist now, in various chess clubs and are not that popular - that this will become a norm is a wishful thinking, and anyway, we will be too busy fighting one another for the last few remaining jobs.
General Intelligence without Recall and those hard acquired Domain-specific skills means nothing really - just our bioware defaults.
Why would they need to differentiate? You're implying those arguments were wrong?
The argument usually isn't "I believe X will not happen," it's usually either "I believe X should not happen" or "I believe we should manage how X happens".
It's just a local minimum. Things today are generally pretty good, and work generally well.
The only issue is that things work well all in the same way, and deficiencies are also shared.
Things will improve as creatives try far-out ideas outside of the local minima. But all those ideas will then be copied into the mono-thing.
At the end of the day, if this isn't about art, I don't see the issue. If your website exists to perform a function, I would rather it looks and acts like all of the other websites in the world.
Siri is a minor part of the Apple ecosystem. Fundamentally, it can call into a better LLM provided by a better company. Siri's only utility is that it has access to your iData and can control your iDevices.
Apple sells devices. They have benefited a lot from their devices being good (Apple Silicon).
Mistral sells LLMs. They would benefit from having good LLMs.
C is a low-level language for the current ISAs we have, though not for Itanium.
So the question is if we really want lower level ISAs. Probably not?
There are many ways in which our current ISAs are actually thoughtfully optimized for superscalar out-of-order processors. Just look at all of the big differences from 32 bit arm to 64 bit arm, which all exist to make execution faster on superscalar processors.
And yet they are still perfectly implementable in cheap microcontrollers. The Cortex-A53, available in boards for a little over $15, is a simple 2-wide perfectly in-order design, without a physical register page beyond the ISA register. Basically, it is a simple Pentium-type chip.
The Apple M chips are some of the most impressive feats of out-of-order superscalar micro-engineering ever. And yet both of these can run the same software with the same ISA. This is enormously valuable.
I fail to see how any sort of much lower level access to the machine would be portable across price ranges and microarchitecture generations. I also fail to see how it would provide a non-trivial speedup over C code pattern recommendations and targeted extensions (eg. vector extensions).
I think they exist already... Crosswords, sudokus and puzzles have long been popular. Has the world also forgotten the brain training craze of the naughties?
Ethics aside, you can create an NGO with three people and do a lot of stuff in it's name that you can't do as a private individual or it would be a lot more expensive to do.
If everyone did this, it would stop being a special ability of some people.
I think the "intent" ( pun not intended) for "intent" to be a moral stance was to not discourage people from trying to do good things for fear they may do something bad and get in trouble or whatever.
In an ideal world this would be good but then of course it's ripe for manipulation because it's hard to prove one's intent
Yes, that's how the trick works. Profit is revenue minus expenses. By increasing expenses, you decrease profit, and therefore tax. But it only works if you had a profit before, because the government doesn't pay you back tax when you lose money.
As a company you collect VAT from your customers and pay VAT to your suppliers.
Depending on the resulting balance, you will either give back the amount of surplus collected VAT to your country/state/whatever or you will be provided with VAT credit.
VAT collection is different from a profit tax or other taxes.
> Are you suggesting that wealthy people litter less?
Yes. Well, middle class less than working class at least. And only on average. Also individual behaviour isn't the only factor - they also tend to live in wealthier less dense areas, where councils have more money to spend on keeping things tidy, and there are also people who do volunteer litter picking.
> Are you suggesting that wealthy people can not be vandals?
Obviously not.
> Or are you suggesting that common people are littering vandals?
Not even sure what you're trying to say here. You think I was suggesting that all lower class people are littering vandals? Lol.
Gaming is a license game, not a hardware game.
Apple wants you to buy your games through the App Store, so they can take the 30%, which means competing with Steam. Which means getting licensed games on the App Store.
Apple already fought one such license war over music and won. They're currently doing Apple TV as well.
However, for the gaming industry they're complete strangers. Unlike music (which is mostly made on Mac) and TV/Movies (which are often made on Mac, at least partly), gamedev is very much Windows focused.
Pushing for ports and licenses is an uphill battle, and probably not one Apple wants to take on. They have plenty of other profitable ventures.
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