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>> it seems like they were worried that the Mac was increasingly marginalized as a platform for AR/VR development

As well as ML development, which is a pain w/o a local CUDA-compliant GPU. Yes, you could do it on the cloud, but sometimes it is easier to do ad-hoc stuff locally without having to spin up GPU machines and remember to spin them down.

Ding ding ding.

I use OS X for all software development except CUDA at the moment. This is huge.

isn't lambda/cloud function/server-less the suitable alternative for that pain point ?

>It could happen, but from Apple's own announcements it seems like they were worried that the Mac was increasingly marginalized as a platform for AR/VR development, which Tim Cook constantly tells us (for AR at least...) is something he's super excited about for the future of computing.

Because it is. High end AR/VR is exclusively DirectX Wintel 64 based. There's pretty much no exception except for the toy implementation of things like Samsung Gear. Google abandoned Tango, and Daydream is on life support. Apple's ecosystem will remain irrelevant until they release their own hardware.

For software sure. VR video content production is still a thing as well though, and plenty of video creators use Apple platforms. I imagine it was no accident FCP gained VR support shortly after the eGPU support announcement.

The iPhone is their AR hardware.

And where do you develop and compile apps for those iPhones? ;)

On a 15” screen with cruddy video card options. And apparently it’s on your lap too.

Or on a 27in 5k display iMac.

It's very pricey, but Apple sells an 18-Core 2.3GHz Intel Xeon W in an iMac with a 27" 5K display and a Vega 64 GPU, and up to 128GB of 2666MHz DDR4 ECC memory.

So while that is not a cheap option, Apple does sell powerful hardware. That's a decent AR dev machine, surely.

In the PowerPC days, they didn't really even have the option of an integrated GPU though. Even Intel's GPU that was integrated into the north bridge didn't come along until 98. And it was more of a cheap option for desktop fleets rather than a power conscious chip for laptops.

oops, you are correct

I'm skeptical of relying on eGPUs for high end VR. TB3 can easily choke the GPU and cause stuttering/framedrops, and missing any frames in VR is a recipe for nausea.

https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/External-Graphi...

If Tim Cook is actually concerned about the Mac being marginalized for AR/VR, he'd get a lot more bang for his buck out of not treating OpenGL and Vulcan like the red-headed stepchildren on macOS.

All middleware that matters on VR space also supports Metal.

"... it seems like they were worried that the Mac was increasingly marginalized as a platform for AR/VR development ..."

If, by "worried", you mean: they went out of their way to smite and thrash the organic core of their customer base, ignored their most basic requests, and deleted five years from their product lifecycle (nobody used the trashcan mac pro) ... then yes, I suppose they might be worried.

Maybe they noticed how many copies of High Sierra are running on firmware-modded 2009/2010 mac pros ?