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Comment by mcphage | Hacker News Reader

> But why do they want that? That’s just making life harder for all the devs. [...] Having to maybe care about DX12 even though you don’t want to is bad enough on its own.

They probably figure, if developers are willing to do it for DirectX, they'll be willing to do it for Metal also / instead.

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Market share for Metal is an order of magnitude less than for DirectX. That's a hurdle.

are there more windows PCs that care about running graphics-demanding software, or are there more iphones?

PCs. iPhones are very us centric ... the rest of the world dominates unsurprisingly.

Windows PCs haven’t outsold MAC+iPhone for several years now...

Don't know about any statistics that cover specifically that segment, but when it comes to new device shipments, it has been reported that iOS + macOS surpassed Windows + Windows Phone already in 2015, and it is estimated that this trend has continued since then.

That's probably a good question. Those who are actually pushing the hardware in both camps are most likely the minority, as opposed to those who are working with glorified web views.

But AAA on a Windows desktop commands $40-60, whereas AAA on mobile commands < $8 +/- scuzzy IAP schemes.

This list[1] is quite a bit different looking from this list[2]

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/search/?filter=topsellers

[2] https://www.apple.com/itunes/charts/paid-apps/

Keep in mind that Metal also works on iOS.

Get it right ... two orders of magnitude less ... rounding up in favour of apple

Are you so sure about your numbers there? What's your evidence?

Over a billion iPhones have been sold, and a couple billion Windows PCs. Not quite "two orders of magnitude".

Windows PC shipments in 2017 seem to be about 204 million (https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3849063)

iPhone sales in 2017 were 223 million (https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/12/29/i...)

The total market share is a much more complicated picture, obviously, but I don't think the difference is nearly as big as you do.

It also depends on what exactly Gartner classified as "Ultramobile (Premium)", which they apparently counted towards the "Total PC market" (262 million in 2017). Which one comes out ahead depends on the relative share of Windows 10 tablets vs. iPads in that segment.

In any case, that still puts Metal and DirectX in the same order of magnitude.

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