Apple Announces macOS 10.14, Competing With Fedora 28 & Ubuntu 18.10 This Fall

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Apple Announces macOS 10.14, Competing With Fedora 28 & Ubuntu 18.10 This Fall

Apple today lifted the lid on macOS 10.14 "Mojave", the next installment of their operating system. If you are curious about what's coming to macOS 10.14 either due to being a multi-OS user or curious what the Linux desktop distributions will be going up against later this year, here's the quick overview...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=macOS-10.14-Announced

[aejsmith]

And no OpenGL performance work? Then this doesn't matter until Apple implements OpenGL 4.5/4.6 or native Vulkan...

https://developer.apple.com/macos/whats-new/ - "Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL"

[-MacNuke-]

Haha... Apple will remove OpenGL... near to all games and a ton of older applications will just stop working, when Apple finally removes it... 10.15? 10.16?

[mulenmar]

Haha... Apple will remove OpenGL... near to all games and a ton of older applications will just stop working, when Apple finally removes it... 10.15? 10.16?

Going by what they did with the PowerPC->Intel transition: they'll keep OpenGL support for one version to give everyone time to move over.
Going by the OS9->OSX transition: they'll keep it as a compatibility mode for the next four versions, and possibly do one or two tiny compatibility updates, so people actually move over.
Going by the way reality works: Past performance does not necessarily predict future outcomes, so who even knows.

[tessio]

GNOME developers, take notice! https://youtu.be/CORL6kACgE4?t=11m29s

[Guest]

That dark mode does looks sexy, I must say.

[carewolf]

Haha... Apple will remove OpenGL... near to all games and a ton of older applications will just stop working, when Apple finally removes it... 10.15? 10.16?

Fun. Would kills all currently available games for macOS, cause trouble with Qt based applications, with Chrome, and who knows what else.

I wonder if they plan to let it coincide with the switch to ARM to make Apple-to-Apple benchmarks close to impossible.

[lucrus]

Hmm, that's a very exciting list of new "features"...

- support for iOS apps from macOS

I fail to see the use case. For example it turns out to be difficult to shake a 23 inch iMac, let alone wearing it while jogging simply stuffing it in your pocket. If it starts to vibrate it can cause a major hearthquake... I'm afraid I'll move it to the laundry room...

- There's a new "dark mode" for macOS to make the UI a sleek black/gray appearance. Related to this is a new Dynamic Desktop feature to gradually change the desktop throughout the day.

Wow, so now I can tell macOS to decide for me what colors I like. I can't live without.

- An improved macOS screenshot tool.

Seriously? If this is a new feature, then Apple should be ashamed it took up until release 10.14. Or it's only buzzwords to hide the only news is desktop colors.

- Greater security from Safari browser improvements to tightened access to camera/microphone hardware.

LOL, that's too much even for iUsers. It translates to "We know Safari is flawed, and we are fixing it in the next release, just hold still a few months".

- An updated design to the Mac App Store.

I can't wait.

- Improved external GPU support as well as ongoing improvements to their Metal Graphics API, including faster GPU performance.

See above.

- macOS 10.14 is codenamed "Mojave" after the Mojave desert in California.

Yes, the desert. It calls to mind the crowded list of new features.

[andrei_me]

- support for iOS apps from macOS

I fail to see the use case.

Probably games are the primary use case

[name99]

Hmm, that's a very exciting list of new "features"...

- support for iOS apps from macOS

I fail to see the use case. For example it turns out to be difficult to shake a 23 inch iMac, let alone wearing it while jogging simply stuffing it in your pocket. If it starts to vibrate it can cause a major hearthquake... I'm afraid I'll move it to the laundry room...

The use case for iOS on Mac is NOT REALLY what Michael naively describes. The issue is not so much "install iOS apps on your Mac"; it is to provide the SAME APIs on the Mac that are already being used on iOS. This has two goals. The first is that it opens up Mac programming to the much larger pool of iOS developers --- they can make minor changes to their iOS app and have it recompile to Mac. The second is that the the iOS APIs are much newer (designed say ten years or so after the MacOS X APIs, which are minor changes to NextStep APIs designed even ten years earlier. The new iOS APIs incorporate twenty years of learning along with ideas that make them, eg, more performant and/or easier to use given the omnipresence of GPUs.

Beyond that the ENTIRE POINT of this year's releases has been to fix bugs and make things work better. Apple users have been asking for this for years. So no-one inside the Apple world really cares about non-Apple people whining that this year's updates don't seem to offer many new features. The newness, the year of work, has been in thousands of bug fixes and performance improvements across the entire codebase.

For example many of Apple's high level API's have long taken a QoS argument describing how important the operation being requested is, so that the OS knows whether to run it fast or slow, or even background it on one of the small CPUs (for devices like new iPhones that have small CPUs). This sounds great, and it worked OK, but nearly as well as it should have, primarily because there were a number of "leaks" where the passage from higher level code to lower level code was unable to pass down the QoS. That has been fixed across the board, resulting in a large number of places where the OS feels a lot snappier. (For example, now when scrolling, the fact that the user-level task is "UI interaction" gets propagated all the way down to the CPU performance controller, which will IMMEDIATELY pop the CPU up to max frequency, rather than the previous kinda slow rise in frequency that the controller would perform by default, since it had no idea that the current task was so important.)

The update consists mainly of tweaks like this everywhere --- reductions in memory usage, investigations as to why things seem slower than they should, higher level APIs finally taking advantage of lower level features introduced two years ago, etc etc.