It's very likely that the "RAM vs GPU" decision has changed. In days of yore, they were separable. With the M1X (or whatever they'll call it), the high ends of each will likely be yoked together.
I dual boot Windows on my 2020 iMac for this reason. The 5700XT/16GB smokes what the 8c/16t CPU can do in macOS. This is great news.
Yes they are. Maya, Houdini, Zbrush, Mari, Substance, and more all have Mac versions.
I have always thought that Apple needed to buy someone like Blender / C4D / Rhino and turn it into a Logic / FCP. It makes a lot of sense and at least then we would get something fully optimized and supported. I tend to find the Mac version of all the apps that are cross platform, simply not as good overall as their windows counterparts.
It's worth noting that Blender has improved its user interface *magnificently* starting around 2.8. For almost a decade before that I would occasionally try Blender, encounter its infamously and unnecessarily hostile GUI, beat my head against it, and give up and go somewhere else. But they finally started listening to criticism about its interface, recognized it as its single worst barrier to greater adoption, and have improved it greatly.
Last I checked, NVidia was sponsoring two full-time engineers on the development of the Cycles-X physics-based renderer, which was therefore being developed to support NVidia cards only. Apple is right to jump in.
Indeed. Right now, in my opinion, the Blender GUI is vastly better than say Maya's. Blender's feels smoother and much more configurable.
Well yeah. You have to convince people to support your platform, and money talks.
Sure, but if Nvidia wasn't providing that support, Blender would still be targeting Nvidia GPUs (and probably Nvidia-exclusive). The price differential of the sort of machine you can host a high end Nvidia GPU in, vs the Mac you have to buy to approach that GPU power simply doesn't favour a free application putting time into the Mac version.
