Project Catalyst - Death of macOS apps?

[Cosmosent]

When AAPL announced on November 1st, 2018, that they would NO LONGER report iPhone unit sales, they ALSO kicked-off a new Corp Top Priority, (Generate) "Incremental Sales" !

This is just another piece of their new strategy.

 

[MisterSavage]

Here me out, back in the day when IBM and Microsoft were duking it out with OS/2 and Windows, and there was no clear leader at the time. IBM made the huge misstep of allowing win32 apps to run on OS/2. Developers largely abandoned the platform and focused on windows. Granted there were other factors to the demise of OS/2 and IBM's inability in many areas doomed the OS. The point however is that developers did not embrace OS/2 since their windows apps ran.

But wasn't OS/2 more of a workplace os? I can't remember anyone I knew using it at home back then. Not allowing Win apps would have made it more niche although in hindsight things didn't work out so well.

I personally think that current Mac apps won't change much, but we will see less complex apps ported to the Mac. Not that this is a bad thing - looking forward to having a Twitter app which is actually updated frequently now.

I have a simple time tracker that I find really handy I use on my watch and phone. I'm hoping this is the incentive to port it to the Mac also.

 

[maflynn]

But wasn't OS/2 more of a workplace os?

IBM marketed OS/2 warp as a cuisine product

 

[MisterSavage]

IBM marketed OS/2 warp as a cuisine product

Ah, I forgot about Warp!

 

[stevemiller]

imo, there is something that preventing Apple from using ARM on the Macs - Apps and this will easily allow apple to pivot macOS onto ARM and provide a large inventory of apps being available on day one.

Agreed. I don’t know if it’s already been discussed to death, but even the name is pretty telling. A catalyst is something that is meant to produce a larger change. And laying the groundwork to kill off x86 apps sure looks like a reasonable endgame to extrapolate from all this.

Which unfortunately will likely mean the end of Macs for me. I’m already looking pretty foolish clinging to the platform, since the cross platform 3D software I use has confirmed they’re not devoting resources to metal, and OpenCl and OpenGL on Mac are dying.

Apple bragging about redshift/octane coming to the Mac likely means they had to negotiate heavily to get some big industry names, but it also means user choice is likely going to be limited to only those that Apple invests the resources to court.

 

[leman]

Which unfortunately will likely mean the end of Macs for me. I’m already looking pretty foolish clinging to the platform, since the cross platform 3D software I use has confirmed they’re not devoting resources to metal, and OpenCl and OpenGL on Mac are dying.

With moltenVK being open source and supporting virtually all of Vulkan 1.0, I don’t really see it as an issue. I’d be more curious why your software devs insist on using morally obsolete software.