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Apple Discusses Push Towards High-End Mac Gaming in New Interview
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It's not turning on and Apple suspects the logic board may have died. It's outside of Apple's one year warranty and I did not want to pay for service until I've exhausted my statutory rights with the retailer (Amazon), so it's with their authorised repair centre at the moment.
Apple has quoted around £500 to repair it, which I might do, but frankly I don't need a laptop anymore and so I'm considering biting the bullet and buying a machine that I can repair and upgrade myself and, as a side effect, I can also use for gaming.
From personal experience it's worth asking at a couple of Apple stores, as in the UK electronics basically have 2 year warranty, even if it isn't advertised, and they might well repair it for free even if it was Amazon that sold it...
It’s not about playing at 4k at ultra settings and 120fps, it’s just about the possibility to play. And it’s possible… so that makes it even more sad
Probably bad SSD. Apple decided to put the logic board firmware stupidly onto the ssd instead of dedicated flash so when it goes the whole logic board is gone. Intel T2 Mac’s had the same idiotic ”feature”. Prior to T2 intels you can easily diagnose fried storage by booting off external drive but those days are long gone.
🙂
I think the message is the list itself. If one scrolls down it, there are a number of things that get apparent. For instance, even though gaming is often regarded as a ”New Shiny” market with extremely front loaded sales, game playing clearly take place over far far longer time spans.
As I already mentioned, the really high volume games have comparatively quite low hardware requirements. (You’d think that would be obvious, but the hardware sales media obscures this. Perhaps because…)
..the tech media darling titles rank low. Very low. Alan Wake 2 which was an Nvidia show case, and a bunch of tech media instantly used for benchmarking, never broke top 30 even new, where it was sold. Cyberpunk 2077, interest renewed due to the new major patch, ranks as number 20 right now. That would be the first benchmarketing title on the list.
It also shines a light on the function of AAA games. There are a few on the top hundred list - but only a few and they don’t rank particularly high in terms of gameplay volume. For platform holders they serve a different (important) competitive purpose, which is why Microsoft were prepared to pay 67 billion USD for ActivisionBlizzard and 7.5 billion for Zenimax, on top of lower profile aquisitions.
What the list is, more than anything, is a reality check against a variety of statements about PC gaming.
(Never mind that in the greater scheme of things, PC gaming stands for less than a quarter of all game software revenue. And ”high end hardware” gaming for only five percent or so within that niche.)
If you want to make games run on Apple Silicon Macs, it is absolutely possible, just as it’s possible to make Witcher 3 run on the Nintendo Switch. There will just be a long list of engineering compromises.
The main reason that they don’t is because the number of Macs used for gaming is a small fraction of the total install base. Apple sells roughly 6.5 million Macs per quarter, so thats an installed base of 140 million Macs on Apple Silicon. It is a lot of machines, compared to say the 50 million PlayStation 5’s sold to date.
But the Mac market is not known to be particularly lucrative.
The main reason that they don’t is because the number of Macs used for gaming is a small fraction of the total install base. Apple sells roughly 6.5 million Macs per quarter, so thats an installed base of 140 million Macs on Apple Silicon. It is a lot of machines, compared to say the 50 million PlayStation 5’s sold to date.
But the Mac market is not known to be particularly lucrative.
Mac owners typically aren't as frugal as someone that buys a console and gets stuck with how to store more games because of limited storage or utilizing computer gear for something other then just games to justify the expense of a purchase. When the Mac 128K first came out there were a lot of games created for it. Multiplan the precursor to Excel was also designed to run on it, when spreadsheets were still text formats.
What cause this loss of the game market was this nothing to care about GPU performance that Apple management somehow got into their brains. For them it was lets focus more on creativity vs entertainment, now when they need to grow their product segments, common sense appears to be starting to return.
I think anyone looking at how the AS SoC's GPU performance keeps getting better would be wise to think again that Apple would be ever so dumb not to try a second time to market entertainment for Macs once more.
Correct. There wasn’t enough profit and, as a result, few games were released. It still doesn’t change the fact that the only way that new games will be regularly published for the Mac (for the MacOS Gaming market to be healthy) is if publishers see that they can make a profit from it. There’s absolutely a non-zero chance that the publishers may look at these releases, find that releasing on iOS/iPadOS devices make a LOT more financial sense than releasing on the Mac (Tencent is one) and Mac gaming still never takes off because no one can find the profit in it.
If Mac gaming doesn’t make financial sense for ANYONE involved (Neither Apple NOR the Publishers), then it just won’t exist. Subsidies just delay the inevitable. (It’s also likely that the noise Apple is making now is just to get folks to develop for macOS then point them to a MUCH larger market of mobile devices that could run a lightly modified version of the same applications. Applications that would, again, with light modification, might easily run on Apple’s Next Big Thing)
It's enjoyable enough that the game sold into the stratosphere.
You can play loads of AAA games on PC.
Apple makes more money off gaming than Sony and Microsoft combined.
Through mobile gaming. I'm not dismissing mobile gaming, nor ruling out the possibility that the iPhone 15 Pro and its successors may help to make the distinction disappear, but for present purposes and what Apple talks about in the interview that is the basis for this conversation, mobile gaming and high end/PC/console gaming are different markets
Not just a niche platform but a niche platform that I feel has been opening hostile to the gaming industry and community for a long time.
It is going to take some major work to change that and a lot of money. One thing people need to look at is Microsoft and how they got big into supporting gaming. They started well before the Xbox project and just got bigger when they launch the Xbox. They offered real help and support way back in the windows 9.x days and even more so when they transitioned over to the NT kernel.
Now they own gaming studios and put massive money into it. Apple needs some heavy investment at least on the PC side.
Whatever are you talking about? It is costly of course, but Mac laptops allow up to 128 GB RAM and 8 TB SSD. And that is just 2023...
IMO AppleCare is a worthy investment with new devices. IIRC one can add AppleCare at the end of the year of free warranty.
Sure, and probably not an issue if you need the machine anyway, but upgrading a MBA or Mac Mini to just 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage costs as much as a PS5 or Xbox, and neither the MBA nor the Mini will be able to match the graphics or library of either.
Now, it would also be difficult to build a PC within the budget of a MBA or Mac Mini that will match the consoles in terms of graphics, but at least you're getting the library and you can upgrade over time.
Yeah, I have it for my iPhone. I've just never had a problem with my Mac before and therefore decided not to invest in it. Mistake in retrospect.
It did make me think, though, that it would be nice to have a machine again that's repairable. Not really achievable anymore with decent laptops regardless of Mac or Windows, but at least there's still desktops in the Windows space.
Well, being “cross-platform” makes it NOT a system exclusive. So, yes, I agree, non-system exclusive games are absolutely different from games that ARE system exclusives.
To be fair, the GPU hasn't improved that much since the M1 series. By many metrics the Pro's GPU regressed after M2..
I think anyone looking at how the AS SoC's GPU performance keeps getting better would be wise to think again that Apple would be ever so dumb not to try a second time to market entertainment for Macs once more.
Solid argument, they should invest in that. In addition to making first party games, they need to heavily fund studios to port games to Mac as well.
Imagine if Steve had the foresight to acquire Bungie, once upon a time maker of Mac games, instead of MS...
Even if it was the best game in the world, how would this make the platform any more viable?
The Mac is too expensive to be bought for just one game. Platform exclusives work on consoles either because they steer purchasing decisions between two basically identical platforms (few exclusives aside, the games available on PlayStation or Xbox are more or less the same) or because the hardware is relatively inexpensive (buying a Switch to play Mario or Zelda doesn't break the bank).
But the Mac cannot compete with the PC or consoles on games library and a good exclusive or two wouldn't change that.
Making the Mac viable as a gaming platform, in my view, can only happen in one of two ways (or a combination thereof):
1) Closing the library gap through fully embracing a Proton-like solution and pushing hard on native ports however they can.
2) A paradigm change in gaming that wipes the slate clean and renders backward compatibility less of an issue. Mobile gaming might be one of those things, with the iPhone becoming everyone's Switch, or VR gaming, but frankly I don't think either is really likely to have such a massive impact in the foreseeable future.
Be cause people would perceive that Apple has some skin in the game by making games instead of just being a storefront.
Microsoft tried buying Larian Games (makers of BG3). It would be an interesting turn of events if Apple bought them and left them to their own devices (still release games for other platforms as well as macOS/iOS).
Mobile Gaming generally ≠ High End Gaming. Yes high end gaming doesn't bring in a ton of money, but it does move the industry forward (from a tech perspective). So really the question here is how long until mobile games look like Alan Wake 2, Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive, or Avatar: Pandora? And when that happens, what will actual high end gaming look like.
Not gonna lie PoE 2 looks amazing. You're right, nobody will miss Diablo 4. The advantage of macOS was always fewer but much better software selection. The problem is, Windows gets them all, the good and the bad releases. If only a few good games were viable as mac-only titles. The argument for the Mac as a gaming platform would be much stronger. I'm still playing Desperados 3, there isn't much else in the stealth tactics genre.