I would disagree with that idea. The Mac is and will continue to be an important part of the Apple ecosystem as a whole, has seen growth even as PC sales have seen decline for years and is now making inroads into enterprise computing with Apple's partnership with IBM as noted in this article from Computerworld:
http://www.computerworld.com/articl...ns-pitching-apple-macs-for-enterprise-it.html
The fact that the Mac is a smaller share of the revenue pie does not in any way mean it is unimportant. I would argue that all parts of the pie are important. Apple's partnership with IBM signals a serious interest in doing a lot more business with the business world and desktops are and will continue to be an important part of that for a long time to come. I think and I believe management at Apple thinks there is a lot of opportunity to make money selling Macs running OS X beyond present levels of sales, particularly as part of total enterprise solutions. IBM certainly seems to agree.
Consider also the development effort and expense that is being directed at new versions of OS X annually with increasing interoperability with iOS in each iteration from UI design to feature enhancements. Why would they spend the money if they felt OS X was largely irrelevant? I don't think they do.
I also think it was telling that WWDC featured a demo of Unreal tech to showcase Metal. Why would they do this if they did not recognize at least some demand for games on the Mac? Why didn't they demo some Adobe product instead with benchmarks of improved performance or whatnot? Presumably they could have chosen some other graphics application if they wanted to including writing a demo for the purpose. I suspect Mac games sell well on the Mac App Store. I doubt that is lost on Apple even if all things considered, gaming on OS X is not the same priority as other irons in the fire at the company. I highly doubt that Apple is unaware of the Mac gaming market and the major players catering to it such as Steam, Battle.net, GOG and EA/Origin and of course the leading porting companies Aspyr and Feral. None of that would be happening without sufficient demand and sales to drive it. All of these companies are making enough money to feel the effort is worthwhile. This goes back to the idea of being a small slice of the pie does not equate to being an irrelevant one.
I think we'll see needed improvements to Metal over time but as usual the wheels turn slowly with some things of lesser priority. So personally, I don't buy a long term scenario of doom and gloom myself. In contrast, I think the future looks very bright. That said, my expectations have never included a stunning transition to full DX 12 feature parity on OS X in a first release of a new API. I know I am exaggerating there as I doubt anybody else would either but I think in the initial excitement expectations may have been a little too high overall.
I think we'll continue to see progress going forward and I commend and thank the developers who have to navigate this transition while trying to deliver the best gaming experiences they can to us on OS X. I just saw some benchmarking videos of Feral's new Mordor release on hardware similar to my own iMac and was impressed by how well it ran and how nice it looks. I was also impressed by the way it was easy to scale the display resolution by percentage. It's just a nice touch when you have options like this and built in benchmarking that helps a lot in getting the best experience on your own hardware although typically I have found the conservative defaults set by Aspyr and Feral both tend to be good starting places anyway. I don't know if that was something Feral added in or is just part of the game on other platforms too. I bring this up because here is a game where Metal doesn't even come into play yet and a great experience can be had on the Mac just the same thanks to no small amount of hard work on Feral's part I am sure.
