But that's the trouble: there's more than enough hardware in a Studio to game with. Saying that people who need a "media" computer don't care about games is silly. I used to run $5,000 PC's for CAD/FEA, and you better believe I ran games on it after hours. I've had high-end Mac laptops for software development work for 10 years now. I keep buying the ones with GPU's. They ALL suck for gaming. Not for lack of hardware! My $4,000 Intel MBP with a Vega 20 runs Elder Scrolls Online (NOT a demanding game) at 720p and 30 FPS. It runs BETTER if I force it to use the internal Intel "GPU". So I bought a $700 PC which runs the game at 4K, "high" settings, and an unwavering 60FPS. A friend just bought an M2 Studio. It manages to run the game at 4K, but < 30 FPS. On the fastest computer in the world, currently! I have another friend who boots Windows on a cheese grater Mac Pro to play World of Tanks. Lots of people WANT to play games on Macs, but wind up moving back to Windows.

IMO, this terrible situation is on Apple. They have the resources to fix this ecosystem, and buy a seat at the table, the same way Microsoft has, at so many tables.

Fair enough except for your example. ESO does not support M1/M2. It's running on Rosetta. Bethesda officially do not support M2 so obviously they haven't made any effort to make it run efficiently on an M2. How is that Apples fault? The hardware is there for anyone to use but Apple can not force developers to use it.

How did Windows become the de facto gaming platform? Microsoft made easier-to-use API's, and then subsidized developers to use it. I don't program against it, but it seems that Vulkan and Metal are reasonable to use. It's the second part I want Apple to do now.

Neither of those two reasons are why Windows became the de facto gaming platform.

Microsofts market share was nearly 100% in the 90s and that's how they became the de facto gaming platform. Because it was the de facto PC platform. Apple was a much smaller company and nearly went bankrupt in the 90s. Microsoft dominated for many reasons that had nothing to do with gaming and the legacy continued. Bill Gates was in court for antitrust violations. Apple focused on other niches besides gaming just to survive and avoid bankruptcy.

Mac still only has 8% market share, hence Bethesda not caring about Mac. The market is just too small.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/11/apples-mac-market-share-jump...

Gaming in the 90's started out on OpenGL, which was and is cross platform. Ports for Quake were being made for things like SGI workstations, because it was relatively straightforward. Microsoft headed off further development in a cross-platform gaming environment by creating a Windows-only API, and making sure developers used it, with lots and lots of money. Windows became the de facto platform because Microsoft used their monopoly to kill off the burgeoning threat of an open ecosystem. If it hadn't done this, Macs and Linux could have been viable gaming platforms, despite their relative marketshares.

That's backwards. Market share is all that matters for commercial games. If there are no customers for a platform theres no point supporting it. Windows got the market share and it was over for Mac gaming. Linux was irrelevant in the 90s. You need a CS degree to install it and it had approximately zero users.

If Apple had the market share then developers would have targeted Mac and ignored DirectX/Windows.

> I have another friend who boots Windows on a cheese grater Mac Pro to play World of Tanks.

What has Apple done to prevent the WOT developer releasing it on Mac?