WWDC18 Reportage

macOS Mojave Metal Mania

The week after WWDC is like a small hangover, no agony or sharp pain, just the long dull ache of reality setting in after too much manufactured fun. Tech Media coverage of WWDC18 was flat and uninspired, maybe it was the lack of a new hardware announcement or a major new software initiative. The mood was captured by Japanese tech journalist Tsutsumu Ishikawa’s sour tweet, “Come to think of it there wasn’t any NFC announcement.” Come to think of it there actually was, Contactless Passes are a new thing and it will be interesting to see what developers will do with them.

The oddest thing was the reaction to the depreciation of OpenGL and OpenCL in macOS Mojave. It was all here and now hand wringing. No journalist or blogger seemed to be up to the job of putting together the bigger long term picture: that depreciation announcement plus Metal everywhere plus external GPUs, UIKit bits coming to AppKit was all just more writing on the wall that Intel CPU Macs are toast. Wouldn’t it be weird and wonderful if the new Mac Pro turns out to be the coming out party for the Apple A-Series Mac. Watching the media frenzy would be half the fun.