Might start to make sense to do "upscaled iOS ports". iOS is lucrative enough that many developers will support it anyway. Adding mouse+keyboard support and gamepad support isn't insane and I believe Apple Arcade games require gamepad support. You won't get the highest end AAA games, but those games usually aren't coming to Mac anyway
>You won't get the highest end AAA games, but those games usually aren't coming to Mac anyway
But even if they didn't come to Mac they were always available through bootcamp or emulation. Is it simply not an option on this new hardware? That seems like an important step back.
I never found Bootcamp nor Parallels/emulation to sufficiently play a modern video game. A $3k mac always underperformed a $500 desktop windows PC in my experience
What does that mean? Bootcamp is just running windows on the machine. You're gaming on an Intel cpu and an AMD gpu. That doesn't change because Apple installed another OS on the system.
I mean that mac hardware is terrible for video games in general, and that at some $1.5-$3k avg price tag, "Macs" (in the hardware sense) are almost always outclassed by PCs (in the hardware sense) that are less than half their cost.
The OP commented games were "always available through bootcamp or emulation", which is true of a Windows-only game running on your Mac hardware via Bootbamp/Parallels... my point is, Macs provide a sub-par, no good, very little fun experience for anything but the simplest of games.
And before I sound like a typical PC bro, this line of thinking is coming from someone who has exclusively owned about a dozen Macs starting with the iBook Clamshell, and only recently built my first gaming PC during COVID. I'd never try to play a game on a Mac again lol
I suppose that would depend on what you put inside that $3k mac. It's very easy to slap a price tag on something 'wrong' and then complain it doesn't do the right thing ;-)
A PC with $4k worth of PCIe storage but no video output or networking would be very expensive but not very good at games.
A Mac with a reasonable video card (say, an RX580 or better) and a general i5-level CPU would run Windows and most games just fine. Won't be a 144Hz 4k party, but 1440/1080 for recent games on decent settings and at least 60FPS will work. But that's not a lot of difference to any other computer...
Difference would be what you start off with. If you buy any $1000 laptop that only has a CPU-integrated GPU but does have Thunderbolt 3, you can add an eGPU for that GPU power that you need and you'd be good to go.
If you buy a cheaper laptop that happens to have some sort of 1050 in it, it would be cheaper, but it probably won't have Thunderbolt 3 and then you'd be stuck with a GPU that will be a bottleneck faster than your CPU.
The biggest problem I'd see is that most Macs don't come with dedicate GPUs, and when they do it's a midrange AMD or workstation type GPU, neither of which are great for games (regardless of what computer you stick those in). The higher tier AMD GPUs did come to later Macs, but at that point (the 5000 series) it wasn't really all that good. Too bad with the 6000 series we don't know if Apple will even add any third party GPU anymore. Also too bad that they got in a fight with nvidia over their crap QA years ago and never got back together. Could have been great...
If you watch the WWDC keynote that’s literally what they are doing. You can write one set of code that adapts to iPhone/iPad/Mac and use the native sizes and tools for both.
