Well, my An Appeal to Apple post got way more traction than I had ever hoped for, especially on Hacker News but also on LinkedIn and also just generally with friends who went out of their way to help me out. So first, thank you everyone, for helping me make contact with Apple. It worked!

I just got off a call with an engineer on the Apple Metal team, and the conversation was extremely friendly and helpful.

Unfortunately I can't share much in the way of crazy technical detail, because it turns out that when I created my Apple Developer account, I signed a telephone book-sized NDA with Apple. Obviously I enjoy writing about technical stuff, so it's a bit sad that I can't do so here, but at the same time the fact that I had pre-signed an NDA allowed the Metal engineer to open up and share some extremely helpful information. So overall I can't complain.

While I can't share any technical details, I can say that Apple was very sympathetic to the Anukari cause. The engineer provided some suggestions and hints that I can use right now to maybe — just maybe — get things working in the short term. But just as importantly they already have long-term plans to make more kinds of weirdo use cases like Anukari work better, while still being super power efficient. And they'll be able to use Anukari as a test-bed for some of that work.

I now have an open line of communication with the right folks at Apple, which is great. As I work on short-term performance improvements based on the hints they provided, I plan to run some ideas by them in terms of what I might be able to write about in detail without spilling any beans that need to remain un-spilled.

Thanks again, everyone!