I think saying "its own parallel gaming stack" probably gives them too much credit [1]. Yes - they put in significant effort, but their gaming stack is neither "parallel" to the rest of the world, nor "their own" in any real sense. They seem to have adapted the open source efforts of Codeweavers, Valve, Wine and the broader Linux community put in Proton and achieving Windows games compatibility on Linux with Vulkan. Adapting that for Metal is no small feat [2] but an investment a giant like Apple can easily make without much risks. Don't forget that Wine has always been developed for Linux and macOS (and the BSDs) in parallel too - it was right there for the taking.
[1]: I'm assuming this is a quote sourced from someone who just isn't aware of all the effort being made at the Linux side of thing in the last five years.
[2]: At a technical level Metal and Vulkan are actually similar enough, but there's just a lot of surface to cover and edge cases to get right.
Granted, Metal is to a degree useful for the casual iOS games where alone Apple probably makes more money than anyone else in the gaming industry.
>I'm assuming this is a quote sourced from someone who just isn't aware of all the effort being made at the Linux side of thing
The podcaster does acknowledge that as well, I just didn't quote that part. The whole "rant" has about 4 minutes. But thanks for providing context, it is important.
Ah perhaps I interpreted the quote in the wrong way then. At first it read to me as if Apple did their own bespoke compatibility work, but it's a comment about the mostly artificial Apple Silicon GPU / Metal stack that is only available on Apple devices.
When you use Bottles to wrap it for ease of use/setup, you catch a glimpse of a future where no program is tied to Windows anymore.
Hope the same can happen with MacOS! And vice-versa.
It's funny, when people denigrate the worst gaming platform in the world as a "toy computer."
People get Macs, that want to get work done. As noted previously, there's really nothing that can beat a well-built PC gaming rig.
I don't really think Apple has ever cared about the Mac as a gaming platform, and the low-key hype around these technologies shows that. These almost seem like "developer 20% projects," compared to the big stuff, like visionOS.
That said, I think that Apple wants the iOS/iPadOS/visionOS to be a gaming platform, so they do dedicate a lot of resources to that.
Let’s be real, we might all be getting more work done as a result but that’s because Apple dropped the ball, hard. They came out with the metal api but refused to support any others, even letting open GL fester. The fact that they couldn’t keep Blizzard of all companies developing games for the mac is all you need to know.
That was Microsoft's doing, not Apple's. Microsoft scooped up Bungie to make Halo an Xbox exclusive (at least initially). This purportedly angered Steve Jobs, who probably wasn't too into gaming himself but understood the appeal it might have to consumers.
Halo was introduced by Steve Jobs at MacWorld. It was always called Halo.
“This is not QuickTime. Everything you’re about to see is being rendered in real time on a Macintosh using OpenGL.” [1]
Then Microsoft bought Bungie and made Halo an Xbox-exclusive launch title. [2]
> de facto anti-gaming in the late 90s going forward
Bugdom, Nanosaur, Cro-Mag Rally and Otto Matic by Pangea as well as Deimos Rising shipped as built-in platform games on various iMacs and iBooks, the G4 Cube, and the eMac. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 came with one model of eMac. Nanosaur 2 and Marble Blast were bundled with later iMacs, iBooks, eMacs and the Mac mini. Previous to that, the Power Mac 6500 shipped with MechWarrior 2 and Descent 2. [3]
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxdgo1rFcxU
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungie#:~:text=Microsoft%20a....
[3] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/405405/what-third-...
Oh, I'm so very sorry! I think there was a misunderstanding. I was actually talking about the development of the game and not its public announcement!
Here is the relevant part of the Wikipedia article:
"Days before the Macworld announcement, Blam! still had no permanent title; possible names included The Santa Machine, Solipsis, The Crystal Palace, Hard Vacuum, Star Maker, and Star Shield.[38] Bungie hired a branding firm that came up with the name Covenant, but Bungie artist Paul Russell suggested alternatives, including Halo. Though some did not like the name—likening it to something religious, or a women's shampoo—designer Marcus Lehto said, "it described enough about what our intent was for this universe in a way that created this sense of mystery."[28] On July 21, 1999, during the Macworld Conference & Expo, Jobs announced that Halo would be released for MacOS and Windows simultaneously.[36]"
Mobile AAA games in the iOS App Store, or desktop AAA games in the Mac App Store? There are some AAAs that work on a desktop Mac (e.g. Resident Evil Village), but it's not the norm at all. As for mobile ... modern mobile games can die in a fire for all I care (as they're 95% gacha nonsense).
It's not the top of the line, but it covers a decent swath, even without doing emulation or translation.
Unless you're developing iOS apps or MacOS apps, it's pretty terrible as a work platform too. I guess iWork is OK, but no one uses it, so it's not helpful for collaboration. Maybe people use it for media production? Doesn't the big rendering still happen on Linux though, and hasn't windows caught up?
Having said that, Mac laptops made passable web browser + video phone + dumb terminal in the intel days, and now they're excellent at those things and added "virtualization host" to that list.
I guess I've always thought of them more like glorified vt100s than like computers. They're certainly market leaders for that use case, though WSL is helping windows catch up.
Like most tools, we get used to our main one, and can sometimes get a bit "sneery" about alternate ones.
The Mac is a particularly rich target, because the "snootiness" is actually a deliberate brand ploy by Apple, and pretty much "leads with the chin," so we have that.
I've never been "snooty" about Apple, but it's been my platform for over 30 years, so I'm used to it, and I get a lot done with my Mac.
You realize Microsoft Office has been on the Mac since the mid 80s right?
> Maybe people use it for media production?
Uhh yes?
I know you can use them for media production. Looking around, it sounds like they still own the low-end with iMovie, but it gets questionable as hardware requirements increase. I guess it's a viable platform for that.
I know a lot of CAD software is missing MacOS ports, so they seem to have lost that market.
Anyway, I'll continue to think of my laptop as a dumb terminal with a good hypervisor bolted on the side.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move...
No it’s also not the year of the Linux desktop either
Sure, you can get access to an office suite at these companies, but people certainly raise an eyebrow when emailed a docx or told to click this office online link to run word in their browser.
In the link you pasted, the studies are limiting the market in strange ways. Like what is a “workstream collaboration tool” (teams, and whatever google workspaces is. I’ve never used either, despite using google docs periodically).
So, if the question is “which wordperfect clone is winning”, then word is a plausible answer. If the question is “what percentage of all documents are created in each tool”, there’s no way office (excluding outlook) + gdocs + iwork sum up to a majority at most companies.
Yes because most of corporate America is doing work in Markdown.
Have you ever thought that your workplace may not be representative of the wider world?
> the question is “what percentage of all documents are created in each tool”, there’s no way office (excluding outlook) + gdocs + iwork sum up to a majority at most companies.
I’m sure you have a citation to back that up?
Ok, uninstall Steam then, I guess? Games do currently exist on Mac, both in the App store and on Steam. It's just that there's a big swath of games that haven't been ported to Apple Silicon in particular, due to difficulty. I grew up playing games on the Mac, so I'm not sure what your point is.
I have no interest in picking fights online, especially in a professional venue, where folks that could have a significant impact on my career are watching how I interact with others.
I guess what appears to be abrasive is just lacking tone. It's just me being mildly exasperated for effect. My point is to stress that the Mac has always been a general purpose computing device. Jobs may have chosen to optimize the Mac for productivity in the 90s, and that probably stemmed from the niches that were available to Apple in the Windows-dominated 90s and 00s (that he learned from running NeXT).
The lack of upgradeable components also held the Mac back in graphics technology which precluded it from premium games market. But the M1/M2 chips are game changers. But since they're newish and the Windows market is so established and ARM chips are different from traditional x86 based chips, it's tough to get devs to port for Mac. If they can provide tooling that automates it, it's a great win for Apple.
Unfortunately, that "pseudo" is rapidly dwindling. I know that there are already AI "decloakers," that look at writing style, and do a damn good job of finding folks, based on that.
I was a UseNet troll, back in my day. It was not my proudest moment.
One of the reasons that I deliberately make myself known, is that it forces me to watch my words, just like IRL.
My career is done. I am retired (not by choice), and continue to work, but at what I want, and the way that I want to do it. Basically, a dream come true. I am not particularly worried about upsetting folks for my career, but I also feel I have a great deal of atonement due, because of my past behavior.
I like the Apple ecosystem. I've been using it to be highly productive since 1986, and have been playing games on it forever. I remember Pathways Into Darkness[0], which I thought was awesome.
When did toys become a bad thing?
"Worst gaming platform in the world" may be something of an exaggeration - Apple Arcade isn't bad, and Macs can also run many iPad games.
Apple may very well be targeting mobile and console gamers rather than PC gamers with gaming rigs.
Personally I would definitely enjoy playing on a high-end gaming PC (especially as GPUs become easier to find at MSRP), but I already have a Mac and a PS5.
I wouldn't mind more of my Steam library working on macOS though.
The core issue here, business wise, is the price tag. People of all social classes use gaming consoles and it is difficult to think Apple can be relevant in this market even if they tackle all other issues.
iOS gaming is the biggest and most profitable in the world. In fact, iOS is bigger than PS5, Xbox, and PC gaming.
iOS uses Metal. Apple Silicon is mostly just a scaled up iPhone SoC. Macs basically get most things funded by iOS.
The Game Porting Toolkit is the first Mac-only gaming tool Apple made in a long time. It shows that Apple wants AAA games on Macs.
>But then Apple doesn't ship devices with actually powerful GPUs, so it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise.
But Apple does ship powerful GPUs. In fact, the M2 Max is probably the most or second most powerful GPU on laptops. But games aren't optimized for Metal nor ARM, so they run slower than Nvidia laptop GPUs.
The most powerful iGPU likely. It still won't come anywhere close to high-end dedicated laptop GPUs in the vast majority of benchmarks regardless of how much optimization you throw at it - that's just falling for marketing / hype.
In applications that actually use Metal natively, Apple Silicon GPUs do compare favorably to Nvidia laptop GPUs while using drastically less power.
So no. It isn't just hype/marketing.
Even if you look at the raw technical specs of the M2 Max GPU, it's comparable to Nvidia laptop GPUs - with the exception of ray tracing.
Is that really the case? I'm not being facetious here, I'd really like to see more useful datapoints. There aren't many benchmark comparisons out there that strive for actual useful comparison, especially outside synthetic stuff with questionable applicability like 3dMark.
And for the "drastically less power" claim...it really doesn't help that most benchmarks are with decked-out "Gamer" machines using the highest available TDP configuration, despite most GPUs having their sweet spot significantly below - especially Ada Lovelace seem to scale down really well (from what I've gathered, still 60-70% performance at 60W compared to 150W with 4080 Mobile, for example).
>Even if you look at the raw technical specs of the M2 Max GPU, it's comparable to Nvidia laptop GPUs - with the exception of ray tracing.
The specs put it roughly between GA106-GA104/AD107-AD106 respectively, and I'd expect it to land there in the general, adequately optimized case.
Yeah, on synthetic benchmarks a higher-end MacBook Pro GPU compares favorably with recent Nvidia laptop cards (say, 4070 or so). But in games that drops off dramatically ... more like a 3050 or 3060 at best.
Why do you think that ? I am asking as someone who is working in gamedev.
Game industry got burned by some big company recently when multi year efforts were spent porting 3d stacks and the target platform got axed.
They built Game Porting Toolkit.
Swift developer were upset by concurrency because the language’s deep integration with the platform meant the best features were (for a while) only accessible for apps targeting the latest platform versions exclusively.
1. Playing games is one of the reasons to prefer a Windows laptop instead of a Mac. 2. The AR/VR headsets will need games to be successful, so they need to be more attractive to the gaming industry. 3. iPads are more powerful now. They support game controllers very well, and you can plug it into a big screen to play. However, most of the iPad games (except Divinity Original Sin 2) are scaled versions of iPhone games... game studios are not interested in porting games to the iPad.
While the porting kit announcement is about Macs, I think that the strategy is to make the whole Apple Silicon platform attractive for gaming.
Cos of micro transactions. Apple doesn’t stand to profit from other peoples games like Diablo 4 as it’s not the gate keeper for transactions.
Apple gaming will not take off until game devs target Apple's devices, and Apple burned those bridges a long time ago.
The numbers for M2 Ultra are comparable to some powerful GPUs. The theoretical TFlops number is close to Radeon 6900 XT and GeForce 3070, theoretical memory bandwidth is close to Radeon 7900 XT and GeForce 4080.
However, good point on the pricing. Apparently, Mac Pro starts at $7k, which is way too expensive for most gamers.
I'm sure it'll run a 4 year old game on medium settings great! But that's kind of the point, that it doesn't stand a chance against the rest of the industry.
Who's supposed to be impressed by getting middling performance on Death Stranding 4 years after it came out? Literal definition of "also ran".
They do not need to compete with nvidea for the top of the line
I bought the laptop and the video card because they are quiet and their price/performance is better than the high end stuff anyway.
I just tried running steam on the macbook, and was very disappointed. My Linux gaming desktop will live on for another few years, I guess.
edit: I think I got the GPU in ~ 2019, though it was released in 2015.
Also, another 25% of my library actually was ported to MacOS, but it is 32 bit only, so it won't run on an M2. (Also, typing that sentence was painful.)
I guess if I want to run the vast majority of the MacOS software that I have ever purchased on an M2, my best bet is to install Asahi, and use the Windows ports under proton. Lame.
Have no idea why the mislabeling happened. Maybe Steam is working solely off dates despite many games being 64 bit before the 32 bit cutoff.
I'd like to see more Steam games that work on the Mac. Perhaps this could help.
So, great. Apple lets me stay away from bard directed bing advertising and OS level spy ware on my desktop, simplify my computing footprint in my household, and provides me games from a few years ago. Seems like a win win.
Source: I am someone who paid significantly more money for a Max M2 Max
Apple doesn't get to take the moral high ground here either when they push credit card and other services ads in their OS.
The more Microsoft and Google tilt towards becoming persistent privacy threats and advertising companies, the more apple will see it as a differentiator as a hardware company with software services to be the opposite. I’m good with that dynamic, but I think it’s useful to acknowledge that’s the case. Pretending windows isn’t a persistent adware spyware bundle doesn’t help the situation.
Upgrading from full-spec M2 Max to M2 Ultra costs $1200. Nvidia 1650 launched at $190 (inflation adjusted, $159 2019 USD).
Plenty of people are impressed at 3060/3070 performance in a 25W system-power envelope.
You literally can't even run the memory chips for a 3070 in that power budget let alone the whole APU.
Like I'd love to see the AMD equivalent APU to that "also-ran 3070 performance" macbook, please link a laptop with what you think would be comparable.
I think you're missing the point that parent (and Siracusa) made - Apple invests a signficant into the software and graphics stack, only to fumble it at the last minute by not having high-end graphics hardware, and caring enough to court "triple A" game developers to their platforms, despite them creating and maintaining Metal and this 20k-line WINE patch.
There's this weird mismatch of Apple dedicating a non-trival amount of time in their keynote to "Mac Gaming" as if it's supposed to be impressive to finally play a 4 year old game on a Mac because they don't ship high-end graphics devices.
Not that it would've been in my price range anyway, but it could've indicated that thunderbolt eGPU support would make a return.
Lack of that is a weird omission if Apple is trying to act like they have a gaming platform.
Apple has a huge gaming platform, and it isn't the Mac.
https://www.ign.com/articles/apple-made-more-than-nintendo-s...
However, I imagine that they'd still like to sell more games in the Mac App Store (in addition to iOS ports, iPad games that can run on Apple Silicon, and Apple Arcade subscriptions) and this might help.
It might also make it easier to port games to Apple Arcade.
Apple is selling around 80% laptops versus desktops, and the rest of the industry is something like 77%. The fact Apple is winning the laptop GPU race doesn't mean it should automatically be entered into the desktop GPU race, where it is not winning.
Fact? Which Apple chips are outperforming the laptop 3070, much less the current-gen mobile 4090?
And in all fairness - Apple's products might not need more GPU power. Cyberpunk and Elden Ring appear to be CPU-bottlenecked, if people are comfortable upscaling they could get a pretty comfortable Retina experience. The 2D optimization and media accelerators are a good focus for mobile hardware. For more demanding applications though, it looks like Apple's current approach is not scaling well.
The other half of the story is a lot of software (inc Blender, looking at these crazy results) just isn't well optimized and Apple is still struggling to win over developers in certain sectors of the market. Nvidia's decade+ investment in the software side has paid off so incredibly well for them, it's basically made the company.
but yea you can say the same thing about tons of brands. Last summer all the AMD fans were talking about 1€/kWh electricity and saying they were going to buy whatever dGPU was most efficient... when that turned out to be Ada by a country mile, everybody pivoted to whining about price and bought RDNA2 GPUs with half of the perf/w.
During RDNA2 everyone insisted that a 10% perf/w advantage for AMD was a buying point, back during the Vega years they insisted that a 2x perf/w disadvantage didn't matter. Rinse and repeat.
I generally think power matters when it rises to the level of a tangible difference... 200W difference between 4070 and 6950XT means the latter is really a non-starter even if it's 10% faster (at a 5% higher price), especially considering the big-picture featureset (DLSS improves both perf and perf/w). And really it matters more in laptops. You're right that Mac Studio/Mac Pro are not really a place where it hugely matters, but, in a laptop, the next-best thing would be a Ryzen 6800U which is about GTX 1630 performance, so 3060 performance in the same envelope is a big step upwards!
And really this "big differences matter, small ones don't" applies to most stuff in general. 5% this way or the other, who cares. That kind of thing is often less important than general UX/quality/features, I'll take a laptop that's 5% slower but way longer battery life or better screen/trackpad/whatever. When things start rising to the level of 25% or 30% difference in some spec, or in price... yeah that's immediately noticeable.
But yea I generally agree that desktops like Studio or outright workstations like Mac Pro are dGPU territory and people are generally not looking for a super efficient iGPU with 3060 performance. On the other hand, being able to talk to 192GB of VRAM is definitely novel, especially with large AI models being the talk of the town this year (and accessible to even the most casual of artists/developers), and the unified APU approach with uniform memory/zero-paging has other advantages for development too. AMD had a lot of this stuff hammered out 10 years ago, supposedly, and then... just never did anything with it, other than sell it to consoles. It's great for PS5 and Xbox, why can't I buy a PC laptop with 96GB of unified/uniform memory with 3060-level performance in a 25W envelope?
Really I think a lot of the people who have bought Macbooks recently are not "traditional" apple customers. The MBP and even MBA are legitimately really nice laptops with a good screen, good keyboard, good trackpad, good sound, etc. I have said before that I really think a lot of MBP customers would be interested in a "Macbook Tough" toughbook if they ever did that, although of course that's the most un-Jony Ives product possible.
There is a clear demand for a high-quality AMD-based non-GPU ultrabook using a 6800U or 7040U or whatever. Framework is the first company to even try, and they're using crappy 13" hardware on the upcoming AMD model while the market clearly wants more like a 15" or 16" (and their 16" will not have AMD boards). Why didn't anybody else do it first? Apple is catching on because they're filling a market niche that everyone else is ignoring, and they're not even really exactly filling it squarely, they just happen to be vaguely closer than the rest of the market.
And now that the nerd crowd has the hardware... the software is following. It's the same reason that CUDA has taken off while AMD's GPGPU programme has spun its wheels for 15 years, and the same reason AMD has good Linux drivers now. Give the nerds the hardware and innovation will follow - when they tinker they'll be tinkering with your platform.
Big missed opportunity for AMD, yet again. Or Intel, but, they're so far behind on APUs/integration that I think disappointment is basically the baseline expectation at this point. AMD had all the pieces, and yet again just chose not to do anything with them.
So it's quite possible to build a well-performing gaming PC for sub-$2000 with RTX 3090 which is still significantly more performant than Apple's latest Mac, in terms of GPU throughput.
I snapped myself a gaming PC for $1300 at last year's Thanksgiving sales, came with a AMD Ryzen, RTX 3080 (10 GB VRAM model) and 32 GB DDR4 RAM, no way I could have gotten a Mac with that performance for anything close in terms of price.
If you were after a comparable experience with the fastest Macs on Earth you could configure a PC that's another $1,000 cheaper than that ($1,600).
The most popular GPUs in use TODAY are 1650, 1060, 3060, 2060.
If Apple can get the M2 Macbook Air to run like one of these, it essentially makes the most popular laptop also the equivalent to the most popular gaming rig.
I don't think I have worried about game frame rate since the days of Quake 1. I set my graphics settings to "Medium" and then spend the rest of my time actually enjoying my old ass games.
Better strategy is to make sure the door isn't closed on gaming for those that want to use their expensive Macs to occasionally play (protect the downside), rather than swing the door open enthusiastically for gamers to rush in.
Re: worrying about fun vs tinkering, I'm reminded of the 4 quadrants of hobbies. What we see on forums are generally gamers interested in gear & discussing, not 'doing the hobby'. https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/04/20/hobbies.html
While the perf/watt is impressive, apple is also using 4 times the number of transistors on TSMC's latest process - and the comparison here is samsungs 8nm, I believe. It's not really all that impressive that that huge silicon investment has some results...
It's a tantalizing hint at what might be possible, but as it stands, I'm not really all that impressed, personally.
I actually added the 3060 bit myself lol
Positively: as a device, having such a solid iGPU is pretty much exactly what I've always wanted in this kind of device. Having performance that's PS5 ballpark clearly is enough for a hell of a lot of things. Who really wants something much faster at the cost of much worse battery life?
But the air of incredibly ground-breaking technical greatness that apple manages to weave around its silicon seems a tad overdone. Given the amount of silicon, the process node, and the target tuning - this kind of result seems competitive with rather than outclassing their rivals.
The Mac audience is not trivial and has deep pockets so as long as porting games is fairly easy the it's an obvious choice.
Apple seems to be doing okay. I mean, a magnitude more people game on iPhones than game on PCs.
Apple is trying to support ancillary gaming for users who chose their platform for other reasons. That's it. They aren't target the 1200 watt, 12-fan 4090 PCMR sorts. And that's okay.
I've got a gaming desktop and also a MacBook Pro. If the next time I go on a trip, I'm able to play some games in my hotel room on (gasp) medium settings, with a device I already own, that I probably was already going to bring with me, that's a positive thing!
-fixed that for you
It is still expensive to have to use Windows just so you can game. Or put all the effort into dual booting Linux.
Most people just use a Macbook and then get an Xbox/Ps5/Switch/Quest2.
For games I can't use on those you can get Shadow PC which let's you play any Windows game ever using better GPUs than I could afford (or more accurately would care to spend) otherwise.
I don't think Apple is chasing the "dedicated gaming machine" crowd here. They want casual gamers to be able to load up a couple of games on the machine they're buying for non-gaming reasons. I'm exactly one of those people: I rarely play video games these days but when the pandemic hit I ended up installing Boot Camp to play COD:Warzone with friends. It was great (it performed... okay). I've since upgraded to a Silicon-based Mac and the door has closed on that. This toolkit is the means to reopen it. I'm not, and likely won't ever be, in the market for a gaming PC. I can't justify the purchase.
> And Apple also doesn't know how to keep relationships with the AAA developers
The App Store would beg to differ. I agree that historically they haven't been great at relationships with game developers but they're clearly able to maintain relationships with third party developers when they have the incentive.
I like Apple and I like their products but I think if you talk to any sizable mobile developer they'd be able to tell you stories about the difficulties of working with Apple.
I'm a big fan of Zachtronics games (TIS-100, Shenzen I/O, etc) and they are also PC-only.
But specifically for computer channels there’s effectively just one: Windows PC.
The list goes on; everything videogames is deeply entangled financially. Therefore, the markets must be deeply entangled, too.
In general, "lowly" mobile gaming still has more active players spending more real-world money at any given time. It's very hard not looking at the bottom lines of some of these companies, especially today's weird Activision Blizzard and not see "the tail wagging the dog" and mobile games effectively sponsoring and/or subsidizing development costs on every other form factor of videogame. The biggest exceptions seem to be Sony and Microsoft themselves, and Microsoft dabbled in mobile gaming over the years, has a big mobile gaming contractor in Arkadium (using the Microsoft brand for Solitaire and Minesweeper, among others, and generating some revenue), and does own one of the largest mobile games of all time (Minecraft) though people often don't think of it as such.
I think it also shows up in executive leadership and how F2P microtransactions hell has been infesting "AAA" and "AA" PC/console development for years now.
From my outside perspective of the industry: "Mobile games" won. PC/console games are the weird, "too expensive" afterthought for most of the videogame industry, subsidized by and beholden to the mobile games. The "gamer culture" that doesn't see most of the mobile games space as interesting or important and doesn't see mobile game players as "gamers" (or worse sees them only as "filthy casuals") is the minority out of touch with market realities.
Admittedly, that's a somewhat extreme perspective and there are plenty of exceptions and gray area and further complications. But whether or not you agree with that perspective, my earlier point remains that overall mobile games and PC/console games are inextricably linked by market forces and treating them as separate markets, and especially treating the mobile games market as somehow inferior, misses a lot of the forest.
(That [currently] Cold War between Apple and Epic has very real stakes, including for PC/consoles, and isn't just a silly "mobile gaming" problem.)
If you're a sizable game developer used to working with Sony or Nintendo, how much harder is it to work with Apple?
For pure mobile devs, how much harder is it to work with Apple vs. Google, and why? If it isn't worth it, why bother? Android seems to have larger market share. How much higher are Apple's platform fees vs. Google's?
I've used crossover to play Skyrim on my M1 mac (and they just sent me an email saying Apple leveraged crossover code for their porting toolkit), so there might have been an option prior to this - if the performance is good enough for your game.
If you do want crossover, get a free trial, but wait for a discount. I think they discount around 30-40% near the end of the trial and during special sales.
>This toolkit is the means to reopen it. I'm not, and likely won't ever be, in the market for a gaming PC. I can't justify the purchase.
I think there's a segment of Mac users who own Windows machines exclusively for gaming. I think the value in these capabilities isn't that people will buy Apple Silicon machine primarily as gaming machines, I think the value is in enabling someone in the Apple ecosystem who plays games occasionally to opt-out of owning a Windows machine.
But I don't think those who pulled the trigger on buying a whole PC in addition to Mac just to game are the audience here: those people clearly value PC gaming a lot, spending that kind of money and going through that much trouble having the necessary setup at home, taking space and time to build and maintain. Those who care that much won't be satisfied with the state of Mac gaming and continue owning those PCs.
It's for those who would like to play on Mac but currently don't play at all on anything because games they'd like to play don't work on the only performance computing device they have - that Mac.
The second category of people I'd like to add are those who were really on a fence between getting a Mac and a PC (probably laptop at this point, as laptops are sufficiently similar for such a fence to be realistic, desktop PC and desktop Mac are very different machines in comparison), could have gone either way, but would prefer a Mac slightly, but also wanted to play games - not enough to own 2 computers, but enough to begrudgingly choose a PC over a Mac just for that reason.
Those folks are likely to buy a Mac instead next time they buy a new computer, which is probably going to be years from now, for some - years from the point in time when gaming on Mac because actually accessible and good, not immediately on spot.
Apple is never going to be taken seriously by the PC gaming industry, there is to much old wounds from being burned by Apple. So the next best thing as a MAc Gamer is to go with a streaming game service and run parallells for weird little indie games.
the only reason they are opening up for gaming on the Mac platform now is the Apple Vision system.
There is no VR games for mac, VR Chat is not for mac. To get Vision any traction they need to have Entertainment on it. Or Porn. But Apple is staunchly anti-Porn.
But we all know that their new VR movie recording system is going to be used for porn more so than birthday parties.
: raises hand :
Coincidentally you are in the market every couple of years for new Apple hardware because of planned obsolescence. Why? Because Apple designs proprietary metal that they are unwilling / unable to support every few years because they instead develop new hardware that completely breaks backwards compatibility. Then release updates to sandbag your older hardware when you still refuse to upgrade.
I just think it's funny that you'll buy three highly proprietary Mac computers every three years but you won't buy one industry standardized PC that does it all and can be upgraded. And Apple banks on you doing that and takes you to the cleaners every chance they can. And you still bag on PC's citing the economical sensibility of Apple.
I won’t buy an industry standardized PC that can be upgraded because I need a laptop. PC laptops aren’t a whole lot more upgradable than Apple ones, it just comes with the territory.
> And you still bag on PCs
The defensiveness here is unwarranted. At no point did I “bag on” PCs. I simply stated that I am not in the market to buy a standalone PC just for playing games.
The only upgradeable laptop you can buy is the Framework, which is more expensive than a baseline MBP. It also didn’t exist until a few years ago, so we don’t know if it has 10 years of longevity. What I do know is that my 2015 MBP still has hours of battery life even after being used daily for many years.
As far as software, 2017 MBPs can download Ventura, which will be supported until 2025, which seems like a long time to me.
Had you bought a ThinkPad T450 instead of your 2015 MBP, you could have upgraded the RAM, upgraded the SSD with a standard M.2 NVMe drive instead of having to hunt for a compatible one with an adapter (don't worry Apple closed that loophole in 2016, no more upgrades at all), easily replaced the battery if need be and still be running Windows 10 which is supported to at least 2025.
Apple's support is better on iOS devices than the incredibly low bar set by Android, but in the computer space they are incredibly unpredictable (will this model be supported 5 or 10 years? Who knows!) and not particularly good.
Aren't the processors not upgradeable in either case? I really doubt you could happily use a Haswell i5 processor in 2023 without feeling limited.. even if just because software (the OS, websites, etc.) assume a higher performance floor.
how much did they actually put into it? as far as I know this is mostly just WINE with an Apple logo on it.
their Survivor bias of the “control the whole stack” philosophy.
> Like how does all this Vulkan, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival?
Vulkan today sucks. Nobody writes Vulkan native engines. It's not optimized anywhere.
Google has twice tried and failed to make Vulkan a thing - first on Android, where nobody cares to target it, even on the Quest, and the GPUs suck anyway; and second on Stadia, which besides the up front product development cost, it was 3-20x worse performance compared to DirectX for the games that were ports anyway.
But I'd rather have Vulkan around and succeed, even if it sucks today. Because having only DirectX, or only DirectX and middlewares for the Switch, iOS and PlayStation, is worse.
I think Apple is testing the waters. They're a trillion-dollar company, and they want to see if they can expand Mac gaming beyond iOS ports.
The podcast seems to missing the point - it's not failed attempt to turn a Mac into a PS5 or a Windows game PC.
Rather, there are a large number of games which could run fine on this sort of technology (including much of my Steam game library that currently only runs on Windows) as well as existing macOS ports whose performance can be improved.
For example Final Fantasy XIV already runs on a Crossover/WINE type middleware layer, at lower frame rates than comparable Windows systems. This is likely to drastically improve the frame rate, improving the experience for FFXIV players on macOS. If Square Enix has a good experience with FFXIV on Mac, perhaps they will be more likely to consider more Mac ports of their games.
Moreover it's worth noting that Apple did claim that the M1 had comparable raw GPU performance to the PS5 (and Macs also use fast flash storage like the PS5.) That means that as the M-series evolves it may become more feasible to port PS5 games to Mac with decent performance. Solid ports of console games could greatly improve the Mac gaming landscape.
But then Apple doesn't ship devices with actually powerful GPUs, so it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise. And Apple also doesn't know how to keep relationships with the AAA developers, unlike Microsoft and other platform owners.
Like how does all this Metal, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival?
I think the on stage demo of the 4 year old Death Stranding running poorly on the newest Macs says it all.
[0] https://atp.fm/538 @1:42:20