But they wont do it because they want to push their own walled garden. And obviously no one will support it because macOS market share is smaller than Linux market share.
Not true? macOS has like 12-14% and Linux 3-4%
I have a macbook home, the one issued by my employer. My personal laptop runs Linux.
That isn't worth the effort
It'll never be enough until it is. Making porting lower-effort and higher performance can only help.
At which point who is going to spend development resources helping the platform of the company they're most afraid of screwing them if it becomes more popular? Half the reason more game developers are targeting Linux is a hedge against Microsoft doing that sort of thing, and Apple is on the opposite side of where they want to move.
Like, seriously, do you think they need longer than that to do it if it's really what they plan?
If they were ever going to do it, it would've been when they switched to Apple Silicon chips, and...they didn't!
Perpetuating the idea does no one any favors. It's just pointless paranoia.
The Mac App Store hasn't existed for 19 years. Then they started displaying scary warnings for apps downloaded from the internet. Now they require code signing for third party apps. Meanwhile they not only obviously do it on iOS but are adamant that no one even attempt to do otherwise, even in the face of law requiring them to.
It's not paranoia when they're really out to get you.
They did, though;
- macOS lost support for eGPU and dGPU drivers
- OpenGL support was frozen to focus on Apple's mobile GPU API
- Apple promoted Mac Catalyst apps instead of pushing Mac-native ones
- The iOS and iPadOS App Stores became available on macOS alongside the native store
- The macOS design language was reworked to take cues from overly padded touch-first design
- iBoot became the hardware entrypoint, which Apple has authority over with OTA updates in macOS
- UEFI and ACPI went away, forcing devicetree drivers to be reverse engineered with zero documentation
Old Macs are just computers. None of these limitations apply to them because you can pick one up and install a normal OS if these concessions concern you. Apple Silicon was shipped in a way that deliberately prevented reverse-engineering and gives Apple the ability to revoke boot-time features if alternative OSes ever threaten them. They depreciated vast swathes of functionality that professionals relied on, and eventually depreciated the Mac Pro altogether. Their tentpole desktop products are a Mac Mini, a bigger Mac Mini, and the iMac. There's not any hardware left for real pros.
But you're still unconvinced, right?
Well, look at Apple's revenue breakdown. The Mac is not carrying much water, and it's a huge sinkhole of resources to constantly maintain and update the OS on a yearly update cadence. Conversely, the iPad is doing great, making almost as much money as the Mac does with vastly cheaper hardware (and bigger profit margins, too). If Apple could have their druthers, they'd start polishing the iPad experience, ship "Pro" hardware to entice developers and boundary pushers, slowly roll out support for HID and external display support, and eventually provide a sort of cloud service for building applications within the Apple ecosystem. Oh wait, I've just described things they've already done! https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/
Apple has no obligation to their niche pros, anymore. They already cut them out and depreciated their rackmount and short-lived wheeled PC. I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that Apple is internally laser-focused on depreciating the Mac and macOS both, either with the Vision hardware or by promoting the iPad as a laptop replacement a-la Microsoft's Surface Pro.
You cite a bunch of changes, but none of them are what people have actually been claiming for the past 19 that Apple will do: preventing us from installing arbitrary software on our Macs.
I still have my MacPorts installation, which works fine, and installs all kinds of command-line tools.
I can still write anything I want on my Mac, compile or interpret it, and run it.
I can still install whatever I want from outside the Mac App Store.
This is a classic example of goalpost-moving.
If it gets popular enough then they start trying to get games to use their app store instead of Steam, gradually make it easier to use that and harder to use anything else, then the gate closes only after the herd is where they want it.
Better, then, if it never gets popular enough to begin with.
Maybe Unity or Godot also offer this benefit? If so then Mac gaming could become much better supported, at least from indies!
Apple self-owned themselves by slowly killing off support for this, culminating with the transition to the M chips and the upcoming removal of Rosetta to put the final nail in the coffin. Their negligence to support a major market is their downfall here. The hardware is more than willing, the software and company are causing the fumbles.
Apple's pivot to Metal and mobile-first distribution was the beginning of the end. The iPhone's revenue potential eclipsed the value that Mac gaming could ever provide, and Apple made sure to capture it with the App Store. Once Tim Cook showed everyone how easy it was to make service revenue, the execs probably realized that they could make bank off of a captive, game-deprived customerbase.
The fact is simple, there isn't enough of a Mac gaming market for the game developers to go through the effort.
The hardware has been good enough for a while now.
I'm not saying this will never change but the developers that shipped games on PC and Mac report something along the lines of 6-11% of users use a Mac. That isn't worth the effort unless you have a very strong IP and you've already targeted the switch2, the PS5 and XBox.