Apple has botched 3D for decades. So good luck with the Vision Pro, Tim As we wait for Apple’s Vision Pro to arrive after pre-orders opened in early January, complete with a promise of 'spatial computing' perfected, Cupertino’s spotty history in the third dimension offers a useful counterweight to the reality distortion field accompanying the device’s launch. As Apple's first product across its …
Before giving up and embracing industry-standard OpenGL, Apple tried to create its own proprietary 3D architecture. This was at the same time as the introduction of its first PowerPC machines, so the real-time 3D capabilities really showed off what the extra grunt of a PowerPC CPU could pull off.
Remember the Graphing Calculator? That was a PowerPC-only app that was bundled with those machines. Also quite an eye-catching demo, to show off what they could do.
Yup, the absence of any mention of QuickDraw 3D and the claim that the Amiga had 3D capabilities* betrays the fact that (whisper it) the author of this piece doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about.
And yes, the Mac doesn’t see much love when it comes to top tier games - but that doesn’t mean that it gets no love at all. The iPhone on the other hand is a gaming powerhouse. There is a lot of love for Metal out there - I don’t think that lack of experience with Metal is what will kill Vision Pro…
No. If Vision Pro dies it may be because it’s a silly idea. But, to put that in context, I thought that the PowerPC processor, PCI, USB, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the HomePod, the iMac, the MacMini, the Intel Mac and more besides were silly ideas for one reason or another too. History informs me that I was bang wrong about all those things. I quite liked the Newton and FireWire though. It might just be that I’m not the best judge on what technology succeeds and what dies - in fact, if I like it you should probably bet against it.
*it didn’t - just like those old Macs, if a developer wanted 3D they had to do it all themselves in assembly code. In fact, the Atari ST (so much weaker than the Amiga in nearly every other way) was reckoned to be the stronger platform for 3D back in the day - just because it’s CPU was very fractionally quicker. (8MHz 68000 for ST and original Mac vs. 7.15MHz 68000 for the Amiga)
The iPhone on the other hand is a gaming powerhouse.
I'm sorry, what? Does anyone actually use their phone for anything beyond trivial gaming? A small screen with no controller, beyond a virtual "thumb stick"? My experience of virtual gaming is one of simple throwaway time-waster games, which all seem to be full of unskippable ads that are touting other throwaway time-waster games full of unskippable ads?
Most serious gaming requires some sort of controller, be it a console-type controller, keyboard, or HOTAS joystick and throttle. Phones, on the other hand, fit in your pocket. The two do not make a natural marriage. I'm sure you can plug in a thumb-stick, or couple a controller by bluetooth, but who is carrying these things around with them? The lack of ability to properly control something severely limits the capabilities of the device for gaming, whatever its hardware capabilities. You are basically limited to "point-and-click" type games, or ones where you permanently have one digit smeared on the screen moving a figure about. Neither of these shouts out "gaming powerhouse".
Does anyone actually use their phone for anything beyond trivial gaming?
Apparently, yeah.
Well, to be pedantic, a lot of people used to play Fortnite* on iOS at least. You may recall Epic getting all hot, bothered, and litigious about Apple taking a 30% cut of the profits from selling children digital goo-gaws and digital clothing and then getting kicked off the platform.
* I personally consider Fortnite to be trivial gaming but YMMV. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ahhh...the days of measuring clock rates in single digit millions of hertz. BREATHTAKING speed ! That and 16k, 32k, or *gasp* 64k, and what world we inhabited back in the day! And there I was already feeling that marketing derived smugness with my Commodore 64 while my friends were banging away on technological Neanderthals such as the IBM PC, the Tandy TRS-80, and the Apple II. I wasn't even threatened when my friend got the Apple IIe that finally matched the Commodore's 64 specs. Even when other folks moved to GUI based computers such as the original Mac or the Atari ST, I just installed Berkeley Software's GEOS on my C64 and...voila...there I was with a spanking new GUI, with geoWrite, geoCalc, geoPublish and geoPaint, amongst others. There was even a program that allowed the use of the C64's floppy drive as a swap space and a fast boot loader. Heady days indeed !
And then the Commodore Amiga ! I worked as a meteorologist for two TV stations that used the Commodore Amiga with the NewTek Video Toaster add-in card. We did all our 2d and 3d graphics with that setup. Looked as good as the bigger TV stations in larger markets adjacent to ours who were using an array of Quantel Paintboxes and SGI Iris computers.
The Video Toaster was the bee’s knees for a time, but that time was brought to an end by the move to digital video. Also, due to Amiga hardware limitations, it was NTSC-only. The digital successor to that product, the Video Toaster Flyer, was never a great success.
The Toaster also came bundled with Lightwave 3D, which was a great (read: affordable) 3D modeller/renderer for its time. It was famously used for creating all the CG in Babylon 5. To save time, they cut the rendering quality to the bare minimum—though I think they later gave up trying to use Amigas to do the actual rendering, and switched to more decent DEC Alphas.
Lightwave is I think still on sale, but it isn’t worth using any more.
Lightwave failed to add a sensible halfedge internal representation (making it horribly slow for large meshes), and had weird as hell behaviour where if you moved the first vertex in a poly loop that had been present since the original version, such that when the sign of the cross product of the first, second, and last vertices changed, the entire polygon normal would flip. That being said, I knew extremely talented modellers who swore by it and could churn out impressive stuff incredibly fast- faster than most in comparable 'high end' software.
Eventually all the programming talent got stupidly annoyed with the multiple decades of technical debt in LightWave, and mass quit NewTek to form Modo.
To be fair though, Blender is just so damn good these days that unless you're working in a particular shop that demands 3ds Max or Maya etc in the pipeline, I just don't see a reason to fork out for commercial production tools if you just want to do the whole 3d / greenscreening / game asset / motion tracking kinda gig.
Plus, Autodesk is slowly buying up the worlds commercial 3d production IP so they can rent it to you forever.
The Amiga could palette swap though which was how the 3D spinning effect was achieved on the bouncing ball. The Mac's OS worked against you, for a change.
The usual reply to the perennial ST v Amiga 3D argument is using the blitter to fill 3D polygons, at least in demos and games. I assume this is what the article is referring to - hardware assisted polygon drawing.
The Amiga 500 could at least accelerate solid scanline rasterization via the blitter, which iirc at the time was one of those things that were touted as 'a good 3d platform' over things like the ST from where I stood, and the 1990's wallyglass mega experience Virtuality VR systems were driven by an Amiga, not the ST.
It didn't get you much, but you could be filling the previous scan line via an external chip while the mc68000 was computing the start / end edge of the next, so the reduced clock speed on the PAL models vs the ST didn't factor in there.
Also as other's have mentioned the Video Toaster was used for Babylon 5 and a whole host of TV vfx from the early to mid 90's, but since it was a whole separate piece of hardware I wouldn't count that as an Amiga native capability.
I found Quickdraw 3D to be impossible to get to perform due to the fact that the Mac hardware at the time had no display resolution switching and a frame buffer size far in excess of it's rather disappointing bus speeds, which just did not add up to a pleasant experience, but perhaps there were some good demos I missed.
I do admit to have had quite a soft spot for the Power architecture though, particularly the nascent Altivec stuff, but mostly because it was nice to have a reasonable amount of free registers compared to the paucity of the x86. The Mac was just not set up for high performance rendering, which was fine, because it wasn't for high performance rendering.
GOing to guess you are referring to how the blitter could fill between two points, but that had a bunch of problems, like it only really handled filling between two actual bits, and couldnt handle points or multiple bits between an actual desired start and end point. It was also really slow, basically doing one bit at a time per cycle.
The blitter only worked for planar bitmaps. The amiga planar display is what killed it for 3d, because the deeper the colour depths aka th emore planes the slower it became to plot a pixel.
Its this planar memory layout to help the blitter which killed 3d on the amiga, because ona. aplanar system it takes 8 byte reads and 8 byte writes to plot a single pixel.
Remember the Graphing Calculator? That was a PowerPC-only app that was bundled with those machines. Also quite an eye-catching demo, to show off what they could do.
The pretty much accidental Graphing Calculator you mean? The one that very nearly wasn't an Apple product?
Edit: Just in case you think that story not worth reading, from paragraph two:
I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. [...] The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead.
Thanks, I really enjoyed that story.
It makes my own situation feel a little less unique. I too work for a vast American corporation that has lost it's way. We however don't care enough to attempt to subvert the corporate bureaucracy in an attempt to actually do good work, so everything is circling the drain.
I would also disagree with his assertion that the powerpc Macs were great machines. As an end user at the time, we put up with them an no more.
The bigger problem is that it's not clear there's a lot of appeal to wear a device on your head. So far, it's only video games that have had some modest success. The day may come where a Metaverse-like experience is considered better than a simple screen, but we're probably at least a decade away.
"it's not clear there's a lot of appeal to wear a device on your head"
Many people are used to wearing glasses / sunglasses. Anything that is reasonably close to that (maybe up to and including ski goggles) in size and weight, and can function wirelessly, is a definite must-have for long-term success. Then it either has to be working in AR, or else if VR, find a way to reduce nausea / motion sickness (I say reduce because I don't think it will ever be possible to fully eliminate - the cognitive link between what our eyes and inner ears tell us about our spatial reference is far too strong). Then, you need matching input hardware (possibly also with haptic feedback)
And even with the hardware in place, what's the killer app besides games?
And even with the hardware in place, what's the killer app besides games?
Well, Meta thinks that business meetings are better virtually than through a video screen, though I think the tech will need to get much better before that is true.
Other than that, who knows? Once we have really good AR, maybe people will prefer to walk with AR glasses rather than looking at their cell phones, for Terminator-style heads-up display. Or maybe Minority-report handwave interfaces will be found to be cool to read documents and work on some projects. Possibly art? If everything else fails, there's always porn.
This came up in a discussion in the pub a few weeks ago, so I started paying attention whilst in big cities.
The actual number of people walking around looking at phone screens is tiny. One particular walk across central Manchester in the week-day morning commuting time, I saw precisely one person doing that, and maybe 2-3 others using the phone to make a phone call (weirdos, what were they thinking?).
I can see a use for AR glasses, if they can be made small and unobtrusive, but I'm not sure that I can see a mass market.
GJC
Anything where the thing in front of your eyes doesn't correspond with the motion of your head, with close to zero latency is a recipe for motion sickness. Some people are more susceptible than others to this, but for a "virtual meeting" to work, you are going to need all participants using these or it is pointless (hint: it already is pointless). The technology for something that can do this, whilst fitting into the space occupied by a normal set of glasses, without weighing a considerable amount, or setting fire to your face is decades away, if physically possible at all. As for ski-goggle type devices, that's a hard no-thanks to sweaty panda-face.
Again, visualisation. At the consumer end : Google Earth. Also look at mathematical modelling, sculpting, etc.
It's not necessary to be using VR all the time for it to be a worthwhile technology.
I have to say personally weight is not an issue I have with VR, although I've not tried any of the Meta Quest offerings yet.
Tolerance to VR/inner ear and eye disagreements does improve over time, but most apps work hard not to trigger it.
If you fancy falling over or provoking your inner ear, try Aircar (both on the Meta/Oculus store and on Steam). It's free and akin to Bladerunner. It is also very intense, the most trying VR example I've found. I only found it completely tolerable by occasionally having to close my eyes to resolve the disparity between a rapidly changing view and my inner ear telling me I wasn't moving.
I'm in an apple-free office - Windows/Linux/Android, so no fanboi.
However, Apple have no real history of innovation - they take someone else's nearly great idea and polish it with easier UI and less stuff to worry about. If anyone can get VR/AR to work, it's Apple.
That said, I'm yet to be convinced of a generic need for this stuff that can't be fulfilled on a regular monitor. Is the market for games and porn big enough?
“they take someone else's nearly great idea and polish it with easier UI and less stuff to worry about“
That’s pretty much the definition of innovation. So Apple have a great history of innovating. (Innovation - the practical implementation or improvement of an existing idea)
What they don’t have, I think we can all agree, is a history of inventing. (Inventing - coming up with something completely new, whether or not it works well or not)
The market for games and porn should be large enough to support VR, but that's not as large a market as some want, and VR is usable for much more than those two activities.
Google Earth is an excellent use of VR, it's a good platform for visualisation. A stereoscopic 3D monitor doesn't really compare on that level and almost always requires glasses: the number that work with an unaugmented pair of eyes is extremely small and comes with caveats.
However, VR is unlikely ever to be more than a large niche - it will always require something to be strapped to your head, and architecting software to be properly VR capable requires significant effort. Consumers tend to object to the cost vs experience length, in comparison to non VR display based experiences.
VR is a commitment. It's a faff. You need the space, and as a product ostensibly designed for what would otherwise be sitting on the couch and holding a controller time, is a physical commitment.
Every person I know who got a VR loved it at first, promised to keep using it, even set space aside. But space in all but the biggest of houses is a luxury, and when you're "maybe gonna at some point get round to it" in a room, that room soon fills with boxes.
VR is a faff.
to be honest, there are niche use-cases for VR headsets: we had a demonstrator for a hang-glider simulator set-up at the Coupe Icare 2023 last year:
VR is niche, and the vast majority of potential users will only enjoy it for half an hour, maybe an hour per session.
It cannot really be advertised either, it has to be personally demoed.
For this and other reasons, the viable sweet spot for the hardware cost is roughly "games console" - consumers and businesses cannot justify much more.
So the Quest 2 & 3 work at "Nintendo" prices, but all the other platforms are dead or dying - even Valve now directly supports Quest.
If Apple charged "PlayStation" prices then they could have succeeded, but instead they set the price point right up in the "already dead" category.
Developers can't justify the cost because there's no customers, and nobody buys a VR platform with no applications.
As to the dev tooling - there was a Quest 3 at Unity Unite, but there wasn't a Vision Pro.
In that case, my trusty old 8086 also had 3D capabilities. And I remember seeing them with the one wireframe game I had at the time : Starglider.
Less than 80KB on the floppy, it's premise was that the dangerous radiation of the environment prevented you from just looking through a cockpit window. Yes, the world was limited and, when you reached the edge, you continued from the other side, but that was hardly an inconvenience.
It was a great game, an absolutely tiny one, and terrifically efficient and engaging.
If only I still had a working copy . . .
The scalpers are out in force with ads for the Wonderful Device/POS (depending upon your viewpoint) on EBay trying to flog the as yet unreleased iThingy for $10,000 a pop.
Ain't capitalism just great.
Personally, I will pass on this just as I have passed on all the others. I'm sure that there are some who want this 'Not a Zuck device' thing. Good luck to them.
Now what happened to those Google Glasses with the spy cameras?
Hold on a minute, imho calling the hololens "a success" is quite a long stretch. I never saw one "in the wild" - only at the local tech fair. So i don't think that it can be considered successful. And i don't remember hearing about any hololens-specific software, not even games for that matter.
I dont think Hololens is sold to consumers. It's designed and marketed for firms (and defence). I've known of a few firms who have used it (and rated it highly) for things like Inspections, where the glasses can show what the routing should look like, whilst the inspectors checks what it looks like in reality. I've also heard of it being used in training applications.
Various reports say it has sold enough copies for Microsoft to keep happily working on it, which in the realm of AR/VR counts as a rip roaring success.
But judging the success by what you see "in the wild" is not particularly useful for a non-consumer grade product. I dont often see Chiron 5 axis CNC machines in the wild, but that doesnt mean they're not a wildly successful brand after all... ;)
App has a motion graphics app called, err, Motion.
It can create all kinds of fancy motion graphics for Video, Movies etc.
In the 2D World it used to be a fantasticly pwoerful app, and still is, but apple only reluctantly added 3D support in the early 2000's
Even now it's 3D support is woeful.
It had more CPU power for 3D calculations and more 2D tricks under its sleeve, but nothing we would consider as "real-time 3D capabilities" other very expensive machines around that time were capable of. The famous bouncing ball is actually a static sprite which uses indexed-palette shift for it's 3D effect. Very well done, but still 2D. The C64 version, which appeared shortly after, uses other sprite-tricks to achieve the same result.
Back in the day, I believed Apple should have bought SGI out of its first Chapter 11.
The problem with 3D is there’s been no money in it for Apple up to now. When SGI allowed their best talent to walk out the door to Nvidia, rather than actually becoming Nvidia, the die was cast - the big money in 3D was going to belong to the graphics hardware people. Which is why Nvidia fell out with Apple - they believed Apple needed them so badly as to such up a large bunch of failed hardware costs.
Apple sells systems and ecosystems. It is usually prepared to back those to the hilt to the degree necessary to continue selling. And as the old Mac Pro showed, Apple has limited success with a “build it and they will come” approach to graphics. As a result I’m actually optimistic about Vision Pro - even if only because an ability to work anywhere on a virtual multi monitor setup, to set up your workspace as you like it, to take that with you, and so on is just very very appealing.
As for porn, does Vision Pro only work with its own speakers, or can it happily integrate with AirPods? ;)
With all Apple product releases in the last 20 years I could see the market. I may not have been the target, but I got it and could see that it would sell. The Vision Pro not so much.
I can see it will have niche uses in certain industries, like building walk throughs, or showing what a room will look like with changes to decor or fittings. Maybe simulation and training. Games too, obviously. But beyond that I really can't see the mass appeal. I notice that many of the big business apps out there are creating Vision Pro versions, but I'd bet that anyone in an office will use them for five minutes for the novelty value, but once that wears off they'll realise that it's just easier to use a mouse and keyboard. The thought of having a heavy weight strapped to my head for long periods really doesn't appeal to me.
From what I can see it'll be relegated to niche industry use and a gaming toy for rich kids. Maybe once the tech improves and it becomes more like wearing a pair of glasses it'll take hold. Long way to go though.
Maybe I'm missing something?
Seems like this idea of VR comes and goes, us boomers aren’t very likely to keep trying it… so push it to the next emerging generation that might embrace it. Put TikTok on it and you have a winner!
I no longer like to use headphones, I never liked ear buds. I tolerate glasses, I would never get contacts, and a big headset is never going on my head just for entertainment. Just call me an odd, old git. Getting odder as time goes by.
> the QuickTime VR panorama would have rightly been praised as paving the way for Google Street View.
Why? Projection tricks like this had been around for an extremely long time beforehand. Sure- Apple were smart enough to package up an implementation for the masses to coo at, but Google didn't need to crib anything from them.
> If Unity can't keep pace with developer needs
I think it's less that they can't keep pace, and more that they're a bunch of lying backstabbing arseholes who reneged on their pricing commitments, and suffered the mother of all backlashes (and even now haven't fully rolled back on their changes, meaning competitors like Godot and Unreal are seeing a big uptick in interest).
From what I understand, these days, people create mechanical objects in Autocad or Catia or whatever, export them to Unreal Engine or Blender, where you can add non-mechanical objects like people, add "bones" to get them animated, or use mocap or whatever, and then create a fully realized, walkable interactive environment that will be rendered in real time in a Nvidia RT or AMD or even Intel GPU card.
These are neither easy nor streamlined nor synergistic to employ.
In none of these processes I've heard that any Apple product does it faster, or better, than any of these either separately or combined. If they wanted to make really a dent in 3D operations, they would have to integrate all of these in a streamlined fashion, including motion capture.
I have seen a youtuber capable of using Blender, and he inserted himself in a Gran Theft Auto environment. Another uses a motion capture suit and Half Life Source to look like any of the assets in Source and for example pretend to be player in Counter-Strike or Gordon Freeman.
Apple may be great for video editing, but 3D, nope. They could catch up if they found a killer app...
I know video and motion graphics shops that just use Macs. The Macs work incredibly well for video editing, colour grading and compositing of elements. This is a large part of their workflow. Since their product is a finished video for client.
They don't have as wide a choice of Mechanical 3D modeller ( AutoCAD Fusion) as Windows users do, but they've plenty of choice of freeform modellers.
Even within a PC, it is not streamlined to move an asset from Catia to Blender... the files work in very different ways. You have to know what you want and what you are doing, and why.
Blender is available for MacOS, I'm not sure what your point is.
Clearly has no clue what they are talking about. You have to be looking only at the Mac and forgetting the iPhone exists to believe that. And be ignorant of the fact that the mobile games market is larger than the PC and console gaming markets COMBINED. And Apple is by far the leader in mobile gaming vs Android, despite having a minority of the market share, so games are typically developed on iOS first and many are Metal native (some use one of a few in between layers designed to allow quicker porting between iOS and Android)
Apple has a massive base of potential developers of games for Vision Pro - the developers of all those Metal native games. I think it is pretty clear that gaming is not where Vision Pro will sink or swim though. It isn't clear what the "killer app" will be, if one is found, but it won't be gaming. If that was what was needed to make this class of products mass market successful, it already would have become so based on Playstation, Xbox and/or PC gaming. Instead Hololens and the like are niche products in the gaming world.
Outside of gaming there are plenty of other apps built native for Metal on iOS. The fact that there are significantly fewer on the Mac compared to the PC has to do with the Mac's market share versus the PC. If Android had market share / app revenue as small as the Mac's market share, it would have a similar dearth of apps.
So no, there will not be any problem getting developers interested in building Metal native 3D apps. Whether Apple can make Vision Pro (or rather its successors that don't cost $3500) mass market levels of successful remains to be seen, but it won't be because it uses Metal or that Apple "has botched 3D for decades".
> be ignorant of the fact that the mobile games market is larger than the PC and console gaming markets COMBINED.
It depends on how you measure it. Many mobile games are simple time waster games, and so many of them are alike - so many tower defenses, so many candy-crush-alike, so many run-along-a-trail, so many top-down-shooters etc etc. There are some good gems there, like Plague Inc which I played for a while, but not as many as your view suggests.
But when it comes to games with more content, more complexity, mobile is out. Like it is here for me. Over 90% of the games I play are way beyond what would be possible on mobile - and I not only talk about FPS with mouse control. Let alone playing on a bigger screen so my eyes won't get strained from the short distance and my neck is at the right position.
Another thing is that Apple tends to throw to compatibility into the bin at least every decade. Metal as the API, will probably be here longer but is in it's ninth year. Apart from that the platform below changes, so the programs must be updated -> Investment gone. That even happened to the Adobe suite several times when Apple changed something again - users either had to re-buy or delay the OS upgrade until the application update got available. Where as Adobe Photoshop 5.0 still works in Windows 11 - install run, done (haven't tried older versions though, and actually use Photoshop CS6 along with Affinity).
Whereas games from 1995, if they are programmed somewhat clean, work on Windows 11. Last example I tried for my curiosity: Microsoft Fury3 (aka Microsoft Terminal Velocity) from 1995. The game just works. The installer has to be called manually with the right command line, else it executes the 16-bit installer, but once it is installed, or simply copied over from a VM with Windows 2000, the game just works fine in Windows 11. If you go down to the applications it depends on how clean they were written or whether they depend on old ODBC or old internet explorer DLLs. If they are made for Windows NT 3.51 they often work in Windows 11, though those are RARE or simple like calc.exe or sol.exe from NT 3.51.
You're just trying to narrow what you deem a "game" because you don't like that mobile gaming is bigger than console or PC gaming. What you prefer is not what the mass market prefers, and we know that based on dollars. Candy Crush may be a mindless pursuit, but I consider all the first person shooter games (just as an example) an equally mindless pursuit.
I hear this "my game couldn't be played on mobile" and then a couple years later it comes out on mobile. You might say "well its not the same if it is on a 6" display versus a 30" display" but people are still playing the supposedly inferior version of those games on mobile in huge numbers.
And if Vision Pro becomes a thing for gaming, it will outdo PC/console games in the long run because of the immersive experience compared to using a monitor/TV. The point of diminishing returns has long been reached in GPUs as far as the mass market is concerned (the market for high end GPUs used for gaming has been shrinking since a couple years before covid, but fortunately for Nvidia/AMD AI came along at the right time) so the fact Vision Pro can't match the highest end GPU in a PC doesn't matter (it probably beats whatever is in a PS5 or Xbox, at least)
One of the reasons Apple has had to toss out compatibility in the past is because they have had to make transitions either from the old school Mac OS to OS X, from 68K to PPC, from PPC to x86, and now x86 to ARM. Supporting those old ISAs and their associated APIs forever doesn't make sense. Sure I guess it is nice you can still run a 1985 DOS application on 64 bit Windows 11 via multiple compatibility layers, but so few people care about it I don't think Apple sees it as worth the expense. When you have 10% of the PC market you have to allocate your resources more carefully. It wasn't until the iPhone started getting really big around the iPhone 4 days that Apple suddenly had the resources to make choices like that. So maybe they keep x86 backwards compatibility on macOS longer than they did PPC as a result. We'll see.
Apple likes grandiose operating system features, not modular libraries with well defined abstraction layers. QuickDraw, QuickDraw 3D, QuickTime, Quartz, Core Image, Core Animation, Metal, AVKit, etc. These systems tie heavily into the operating system so they can't be maintained for long. VR/AR is not easy. The time it takes Apple to finish the system is longer than they can maintain the system. The Vision Pro will be ready just as the hardware that can run it is obsolete.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technologies for the vast array of aging, starting, and overlapping APIs.
A bunch of other developers will build modular libraries that get VR/AR running on Windows and Linux. Those libraries might initially crude compared to Apple's but they'll live on and evolve.
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