I’m already planning on swapping mine for an M4 Ultra.

I love my M1 Studio. It’s the Mac I always wanted - desktop Mac with no integrates peripherals, a ton of ports - although I still use a high end hub to plug in… lot more. Two big external SSDs, my input peripherals (I’m a wired mouse and keyboard kind of guy) then a bunch of audio and USB midi devices.

It’s even a surprisingly capable gaming machine for what it is. Crossover is pretty darn good these days, and there are ARM native Factorio and World of Warcraft ports that run super well.

I haven’t dug too much into gaming since I have a Linux PC that supports all my steam games but what’s the experience of running Crossover on Apple Silicon like? Can you run x86 Windows games using Rosetta (or is it some other method)?

Yea, it’s running via Rosetta. Just install windows steam and launch game. That is with the paid version of crossover though.

Don’t expect to play dark souls on it, but for indies and the like it’s fine.

Cool. Just saw it has a 14 day trial, will give it a shot on my M1 Max Studio and see how it goes.

(Dark Souls is my favourite game/series…how did you know)

I mean, you actually probably COULD play Dark Souls on it, but you'd be turning settings down a bit I bet (I don't actually know how optimized that game is). I'm pushing a 1440p display which certainly doesn't make things easier on the Mac.

The biggest annoyance I've hit actually is that game controller support is pretty bad. Don't expect generic USB HID game controllers to work, support for that isn't baked into MacOS the way it is Windows (Via DirectInput, etc).

The happy path is pretty much specifically a bluetooth xbox controlle.