And, as expected, Apple also previewed macOS 10.14, nicknamed Mojave.
Apple today previewed macOS Mojave during its keynote event at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California. Version 10.14 of the Mac operating system introduces a slew of new features, including a Dark Mode, Dynamic Desktop wallpapers, Desktop Stacks, a redesigned Mac App Store, and more.
I wasn’t particularly overly impressed with what Apple demonstrated regarding Mojave – nice features, sure, but nothing groundbreaking or revolutionary. As with the other previewed operating systems, the first developer preview is available today, and the final release will ship in Autumn.
There’s one thing about Mojave we have to talk about, though – but that deserves its own news item.
You are not impressed, but you don’t give a clue as to why. What more does a desktop operating system really need to do – raise the dead?
When you start building your own operating systems that changed humanity, go easy on the ‘not impressed argument’. Its probably just the first world problems Kim Khardhasian in you.
I am very glad to see Apple is sticking to its philosophy of macOS being a desktop operating system first, a traffic cop that manages the resources of your computer and enhances your interaction with it.
Unlike Windows 10 with its pointless strategy, messed up apps and half done features. Yes, I use Windows 10, but seriously, its been crap since July 2015.
Besides, Microsoft is taking a long exit out of the desktop OS business. With the GitHub purchase, its going back to being a tooling company first. By 2025, Microsoft’s strategy will be, use our apps on whatever OS you like. Because as far it goes, Microsoft’s only consumer strategy is Xbox.
So, in future, make mandatory to be verbose why you are not impressed – trust me, I have the bandwidth to read it.
As far as it goes Windows owns over 80% of the desktop. I don’t think the word “strategy” means what you want it to mean…
macOS as being the primary platform for pushing new ideas, new technologies is over, iOS has well and truly replaced it as the incubator of new tech, as the platform to push this new technology.
However i dont think it’s a bad thing, macOS is still getting features (APFS etc..) , its getting security updates which really is all i need from macOS. It matured and pretty much became feature complete around snow leopard, apps like iMessage are nice, other bits are nice, but really the key technologies are in place, the system is stable and generally well optimised, everything since then is a tinker. iOS on the other hand was in fast growth interation / build to maturity.
The next big growth or a platform to push will be watchOS, Apple will work very hard to make both the software and the hardware more independent until it can run without a iPhone, similar to how Apple decoupled the iPhone from iTunes on a desktop.
Apple’s future growth strategy is services. If you look at whats in Mojave, its been done already in other operating systems or third party tools:
Gallery – Windows XP Filmstrip View (2001)
Meta data – Apple’s own Tiger (2005) and Vista (2006)
Change location of your screenshots
Clean up your desktop with stacks.
They are not earth shattering or must have, but they do make it even more usable.
But if Apple is looking to maintain shareholder value, I see them going hard on services. Hence the new investments in creating original content ala Netflix, Apple Music, iCloud/Storage, Maps, News, Ad Network, App Store revenue (that 30% cut still matters).
Anything they can get some form a subscription out of will definitely be the focus. Its already creating great returns.
Your very first post on this thread is you berating Thom pretty harshly for saying this:
Serious question: WTF is the difference?
Edited 2018-06-05 17:35 UTC
Gallery is CoverFlo 2.0
What? They’ve done no such thing. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to connect an iPhone to iTunes to activate, restore, or otherwise troubleshoot the device. True, the average user may never have to do it, but I can assure you that the iPhone has never been decoupled from iTunes. I wish it were, since iTunes is just about the worst piece of software in wide use today. At minimum, I should be able to plug iDevices into other iDevices (iPad Pro, for example) to do this restoration and troubleshooting. Alas, and stupidly, iTunes is still required.
To me these points seem worthy of note:
– OpenGL and OpenCL are being deprecated with this release and will supposedly be removed. This matters, a lot. Not to people who use Unreal or Unity or are writing code with whatever frameworks… but to those that are actually trying to directly use OpenGL or OpenCL for the sake of being cross-platform… it means that they really *really* cannot do so now. (Granted I’m sure there are frameworks that do GL -> Metal translation anyway, but needing to use *yet another* framework or library is kind of a pain.)
– The hardware requirement has gone up again. High Sierra didn’t raise the hardware requirement, but Mojave does. I can no longer run the latest macOS on my 2010 MacBook. (Which runs fine still, fwiw.) This is inevitable and expected, but it is a bit sad. While iOS 12 is focusing on performance and older device support, macOS is not.
– macOS Mojave will be the last to support 32-bit apps. This doesn’t matter to me, but I realize that for some going beyond Mojave will be a deal breaker.
On the aesthetic side I’m really looking forward to running Mojave. I wonder if there will be an official way to produce these transitive/dynamic wallpapers. Haven’t looked into it, so maybe that’s already been explained.
Likewise, “Dark Mode” is nice. Hopefully an indicator of Apple’s willingness to support such a thing on a certain other OS of theirs… Incidentally, no, I don’t need a pure black option, just something easier on the eyes is great. (I’m not fond of pure white either as far as light mode goes.)
Is there any advantages of Metal instead over Vulkan?
How different are Metal and Vulkan?
Technically they’re not massively different.
Metal is a lot easier to get started with what with Swift bindings and lots of excellent tooling in metal shaders, debuggers and XCode.
Vulkan has some of that stuff but not being Apple’s vertically integrated approach you’ll have to rely on your own tooling or whatever you can patch together. Vulkan’s API is based on C and is INCREDIBLY verbose. It’s not meant for direct coding. It’s meant as a target for middleware.
Having said all that these guys https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK have got a Vulkan to Metal adapter layer up and running. If I understand this correctly one can statically link the adapter into an application running on iOS or MacOS so no app code has to change – magically Metal is spoken to the OS.
Vulkan is likely to supplant OpenGL ES on Android very soon. I expect to see ES 1.1, 2 and 3 support deprecated and replaced with an adapter layer that talks Vulkan to the underlying OS. That will save a /lot/ of coding effort from GPU driver guys.
Once that is achievable I expect to see applications written with OGL take the same adapter layer approach as MoltenVK e.g. application code remains the same but all OGL (and EGL or AGL) calls are converted to Metal (iOS) or Vulkan (Android).
I’m not happy with the hardware requirements. All of a sudden my 2011 iMac with Core i5 processor can’t run the new OS. And it’s all because of the graphics card requirement, which is not upgradeable.