That article is pretty salty, it seems they want Apply to supply them with OpenGL "or else". Either they are using an engine that doesn't allow for other low level rendering options or they simply don't want to.
It's extremely arrogant to kill OpenGL and expect all app developers to rewrite their apps using Metal. The last I looked MacOS market share wasn't doing so well. And how much of that market is CAD?
Maybe they did a simple ROI calculation and determined it simply was not worth the development, but might have been if Apple would meet them half way and support OpenGL.
So this is not necessarily an issue with Apples deprecation of OpenGL, but could as well be Autodesk wanting to move also the Alias product to DirectX only.
This seems more damaging to Apple than to Autodesk. If Apple let these niche-but-lucrative markets wither away one by one, where does the Mac end up?
I think that's very difficult for us to judge. Apple has access to far more data than we do. They may have decided that Autodesk's entire market is not worth their time.
Apple is a very strange company. Even though they're among the largest companies in the entire world in terms of value, they don't operate like a large company. They shift their product teams around all the time which seems to cause some products to get neglected for a really long time.
It does seem like a strange strategy not to court these high-end markets, though.
As a developer, it often feels like Apple is ignoring me in favour of some nebulously-defined market of “designers”. But here we have actual designers, industrial product designers, being similarly ignored.
Each deprecation on its own is understandable, and probably makes sense when the goal is a modern, safer OS.
But when macOS is not your main target market, at some point it doesn't pay off anymore to try to keep up with the annual technology changes. If you have a big code base, those yearly modernisations are a lot of effort.
And Apple doesn't make the impression that they care about things they break. I've filed a lot of bug reports with Apple for regressions, but if it's not a mainstream issue they just won't fix it. If you're lucky, you'll get a reply saying that they don't support your use case anymore.
So they just break some stuff, and app developers need to find workarounds.
I really understand if at some point the developer says, this isn't worth it, we'll just focus on the more profitable platform.
At the price range of Autodesk, buying a new PC to run the software isn't really a big issue...
I'm certain they've done the math and are confident that it's better for them to expect users will either switch to PC's, install Windows using bootcamp, or stay on old versions of Mac OS. They say as much right in the article.
My guess is the defective laptop issue alone is driving a measurebale shift. The reason many folks were going Mac was the Unix tool chain, which Apple is also allowing to rot. Microsoft is basically shipping Ubuntu.
Last time I checked, Windows 10 is still a shit-show and completely unusable as a workstation. It’s good as a toy to play Candy Crush, sure (it even comes preinstalled!) but definitely not suitable for real work.
The per-user licensing allows for installs on multiple devices (5, I think, unless that also recently changed), so it can work out to about $35 per device.
The Enterprise licenses used to revert to Pro licenses when the subscription expired, not sure if they still do.
Users of Windows 10 tend to like it. IT people hate it.
This doesn’t mean it should be considered normal - in fact putting up with this shit sets a precedent that this kind of behaviour from OS developers is deemed acceptable.
This also doesn’t mention the other relatively minor issues (which macOS nevertheless gets right) like 3 different visual styles for context menus (on the taskbar, window title bar and an item on your desktop), the mess with two different way to configure the machine (Settings app and Control Panel), etc.
Engineers (mechanical, low level software, firmware) are Windows and Linux predominately.
Only when it comes to professional graphic design. But there's also professional CAD (almost entirely PC based), and the hobbiest space that originates from video game and anime culture, modding and fan art.
ISV: We're not going to do a special port to $proprietaryAPI of $singlepercentmarketshareOS of our x-million LOC each applications.
Hackernews: Look how salty $ISV is.
Moving from OpenGL 2 to OpenGL 4 would have been just as much work as moving to Metal 2.
According to Wikipedia, the first version of Alias is from the 80s, and it initially ran only on IRIX. From that, I'd guess that it was initially written using IRIS GL, the predecessor of OpenGL. It probably doesn't have a separate "rendering engine"; IRIS GL and later OpenGL concepts and calls are probably strewn all over the code. Porting to anything else would probably be a significant effort.