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INSIDE APPLE'S MASSIVE PUSH TO TRANSFORM THE MAC INTO A GAMING PARADISE

UltimaKilo

Gold Member
Great article on Apple's history with gaming, and their recent slow/stealth approach to taking market share and brining gamers into the Apple ecosystem.

For those of you who haven't been paying attention: this is Microsoft's real competition. Apple is attempting to give consumers yet another reason to dump Windows. It's going to be interesting to see what Apple does going into 2025. Worth a read.

Link to the full article here

On July 21, 1999, Steve Jobs stood on stage in front of a packed Macworld Expo New York audience and announced a video game that would go on to influence the entire games industry and turn Apple into a gaming powerhouse.

Half of that promise turned out to be true. The first-person shooter that Jobs revealed didchange the course of video game history — but not for Apple. Instead, Microsoft purchased the game’s developer a year later, snatching up the title for the launch of the original Xbox in 2001.
The game Microsoft “stole” from Jobs and Apple was called Halo: Combat Evolved, and the developer was Bungie, a pioneering game studio for the Mac. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

In an alternate universe, Apple never lost Halo to its long-time tech nemesis, the Xbox never became a gaming juggernaut because it didn’t have Master Chief, and the Mac — not PC — went on to become the biggest non-console platform for blockbuster games.

No doubt “losing” in gaming for decades has not been fun for Apple. It’s certainly painful and disappointing for Mac users both new and old, who have to buy a separate PC or console to play AAA games. But in 2023, the winds of change began to blow.

With a lineup of Mac hardware that can finally go toe to toe with some of the best PCs (gaming-specific or not), year-over-year improvements to Apple silicon that push performance higher and higher, and more gaming-focused software optimizations for developers and users, Apple is not looking to repeat history again.

Apple has deployed its teams on the map with capable weapons and plenty of reloads. Now, all it needs to do is capture the flag. Easier said than done, but not impossible for a company valued at nearly $3 trillion and used to playing the long game.

“We've got Mac-specific features that you don't find on every other system like our displays, our speaker systems,” Gordon Keppel, a Mac product marketing manager, tells Inverse. “So when I'm sitting in front of a system that is performant, it looks great, it sounds great, it doesn't get incredibly hot — that is a great gaming experience!”
Fast forward to 2023, and Apple has a renewed interest in gaming on the Mac, the likes of which it hasn’t shown in the last 25 years.

“Apple silicon has changed all that,” Keppel tells Inverse. “Now, every Mac that ships with Apple silicon can play AAA games pretty fantastically. Apple silicon has been transformative of our mainstream systems that got tremendous boosts in graphics with M1, M2, and now with M3.”

Ask any gadget reviewer (including myself) and they will tell you Keppel isn’t just drinking the Kool-Aid because Apple pays him to. Macs with Apple silicon really are performant computers that can play some of the latest PC and console games. In three generations of desktop-class chip design, Apple has created a platform with “tens of millions of Apple silicon Macs,” according to Keppel. That’s tens of millions of Macs with monstrous CPU and GPU capabilities for running graphics-intensive games.

Apple’s upgrades to the GPUs on its silicon are especially impressive. The latest Apple silicon, the M3 family of chips, supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and mesh shading, features that only a few years ago didn’t seem like they would ever be a priority, let alone ones that are built into the entire spectrum of MacBook Pros.

The “magic” of Apple silicon isn’t just performance, says Leland Martin, an Apple software marketing manager. Whereas Apple’s fallout with game developers on the Mac previously came down to not supporting specific computer hardware, Martin says Apple silicon started fresh with a unified hardware platform that not only makes it easier for developers to create Mac games for, but will allow for those games to run on other Apple devices.
This unified hardware platform approach is similar to what you get with a console like the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series S/X. With the same architecture, there’s a guarantee that every Mac with a certain chipset generation can run a certain game at optimal settings right out of the box, as opposed to leaving it to gamers to figure out whether their PC’s specs are enough.

“Gaming was fundamentally part of the Apple silicon design,” Doug Brooks, also on the Mac product marketing team, tells Inverse. “Before a chip even exists, gaming is fundamentally incorporated during those early planning stages and then throughout development. I think, big picture, when we design our chips, we really look at building balanced systems that provide great CPU, GPU, and memory performance. Of course, [games] need powerful GPUs, but they need all of those features, and our chips are designed to deliver on that goal. If you look at the chips that go in the latest consoles, they look a lot like that with integrated CPU, GPU, and memory.”

When Apple announced the M3 chips at its “Scary Fast” October event, it touted certain hardware features built into the silicon that were big firsts for Macs. There’s the aforementioned hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shaders, which make games look more realistic with real-time lighting and models with more detailed polygons and textures. But the feature few people are talking about, and the one that could make games on M3-powered Macs and future Apple computers really shine, is Dynamic Caching.

Link to article
 

Interfectum

Member
The transformation will occur 4-5 years from now when they start shoving M2/3 chips into low cost products like AppleTV and modern AAA games start launching day/date on Apple Arcade.

The pieces are almost in place but the pricing is still way off and they have no exclusive software to push their agenda. They gotta buy someone.
 
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VyAStNc.gif
 

WitchHunter

Banned
this is Microsoft's real competition
well... another big monkey killing the industry just to squeeze more shit out of people because it needs to grow. AAPL, just like MSFT is a virus.

we move into tv series, we move into electric cars, we move into bread, we move into agriculture, soon we will make your underpants too.
 
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Sushi_Combo

Member
The transformation will occur 4-5 years from now when they start shoving M2/3 chips into low cost products like AppleTV and modern AAA games start launching day/date on Apple Arcade.

The pieces are almost in place but the pricing is still way off and they have no exclusive software to push their agenda. They gotta buy someone.
They should Acquire Microsoft Game Studios.
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
MASSIVE PUSH!!! ???

scooby-doo-where.gif



please people stop with the manufactured hype narratives. Almost everything that people said was hyped lately literally was never hyped at all.
 
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poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
What? This doesn't make any sense. The initial Halo part is just nonsensical, xbox and halo had nothing to do with PC being a viable gaming platform - in fact the opposite - the xbox success was bringing PC style gaming to consoles.
The one advantage mac has over PC is fixed hardware. But guess what also has fixed hardware and doesn't cost $1000's - consoles. Sure if you have a Mac it's nice that you can now play some games on it, but you aren't buying it for gaming. Apple isn't going to invest billions into gaming because the returns are shitty, they already have the golden goose of skimming off the top of mobile with zero effort. At best they would invest in a steam replacement for their OS - but ask Epic how that works out.
 
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Magic Carpet

Gold Member
Apple will have a conference and at some point Gabe will walk out behind the curtain with a giant cardboard key that has Steam written on it and hand it to Tim Cook.

Gabe always hated Microsoft so this was the next best option.
 

ssringo

Member
"In an alternate universe, Apple never lost Halo to its long-time tech nemesis, the Xbox never became a gaming juggernaut because it didn’t have Master Chief, and the Mac — not PC — went on to become the biggest non-console platform for blockbuster games."

I like how Halo was not only the sole key to Microsoft's success but it would've single handedly prevented the rise of Valve and PC.

Helluva AU.
 

Holammer

Member
I believe they're trying when they release an Apple branded controller. Now they're just a fk'n annoyance with Arcade.
Clap Hanz Golf & Sonic whatisname is lost in that dark pit.
 
Eh, don’t see it happening. It to price out. Even if they start having the m1 or2.mostly m3 when it’s on the lower price scale. It still just be games then in this era ten years later. Love the Apple ecosystem beside that.
 
The transformation will occur 4-5 years from now when they start shoving M2/3 chips into low cost products like AppleTV and modern AAA games start launching day/date on Apple Arcade.

The pieces are almost in place but the pricing is still way off and they have no exclusive software to push their agenda. They gotta buy someone.
Sony? That would be a powerful merger.
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
The problem with Apple hardware is their software, they want devs to use their own Apple API instead of using what's already used by devs
Why would devs waste their time
thats what the new gamekit is for and its actually very quick and easy to use to port a game.
 
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