Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Godel_unicode 1158 days ago
> It would not require a lot of changes.

It would require Apple to stop being Apple. Give up their App Store revenue (Steam) and give up their proprietary 3D API in favor of a standard? Might as well ask for a Start button.
1 comments
panick21_ 1158 days ago
Not really. Supporting standard 3D API on that hardware wouldn't be that hard. They don't have that much different hardware that supporting a driver for it would be that difficult.

> Give up their App Store revenue

They are not giving up anything they currently earn, they would be adding sales of hardware and games.

They could make a deal with Steam or make their own steam and make it easy for Games to port their games to it. They could likely find some way to monetize this.

link
Godel_unicode 1158 days ago
> wouldn't be that hard.

What are you basing that on? They’ve spent a lot of time talking about how optimized the hardware and software are for each other, why are you so sure that getting equivalent performance and efficiency would be easy? Consider how trash MoltenVK is compared to Metal. About the best you can say is that it technically works.

> not giving up anything they currently earn

That’s not how Apple thinks. If they cut someone else in, especially a behemoth like Steam, they’re signing away their ability to do Apple Arcade for MacOS in the future. Look at the whole Kindle vs Apple Books fiasco, they’re never going to let someone else in the pool again. They won’t even let the XCloud game streaming app on.

link
panick21_ 1158 days ago
Because with very few developers Asahi Linux people have made a huge amount of progress. Apple could have 10x as many people working on it and it would be a tiny drop in the bucket. Even if you lose some performance, its still worth it to run Vulcan software.

> never going to let someone else in the pool again

Then make a proper games platform that is easy to target for games that are already on steam.

link