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

Spukc

always chasing the next thrill
Weird flex. Because what makes an expensive Apple product "insane" is the ability to achieve parity with Geforce Now. Which can do the exact same thing with any old crap piece of hardware you already have. Thanks for gaming paradise, Apple.
Tell us where uncle tim cook touched you
 

RickMasters

Member
Sony? That would be a powerful merger.

Except........ It would not be a merger. it would be an aquisition. Apple would be interested in sony for three things...the music biz, because they would get a huge catalog of artists music that they would either make exclusive to itunes or charge spotify etc a fee.....the movie stuff would be good for apple TV. ....playstation for the games of course. they have no use for any other divisions so they would be spun off or wound down.


or......sony just sells the playstation part....but why would they do that when playstation is the bulk of their profits these days? It might seem to good to PS fans (Because of apple's resources, and ability to compate financially with MS) and obviously to apple.....but not such a good idea for sony. If/when apple goes all in...it will be with their own hardware, on their own terms. with devs/pubs they have acquired, not partnered with.playstation is something they either acquire or compete against. cooperation between the two doesnt really benefit sony. For those reasons, I dont see that ever happening.

sony would have to be in a lot of financial trouble to sell their breadwinner. and honestly I hope that day never comes because I would miss their TVs, audio gear and general electronics. if apple aquires them they would spin off everything that has nothing to do with music, movies or games. and what would be left of sony at that point?


As for apple. theres room for them for sure. apple,'s cult like fanbase would be more than happy to throw away their consoles/PCs and just game on apple devices. the rest of us will always have the option to do otherwise. The big question for me is...what devs does apple buy? I could see them wanting Ubisoft, for some reason.
 

poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
On a fundamental level, most people hate Windows. If something could take over Windows, I think most people would be super happy with that.
People hate windows for the same reason that everyone uses it - it straddles the line between usability and freedom to do whatever you want. It's like people hate youtube and want an alternative when they have to know full well that the alternative would have to do all the things they dislike to be that succesful.
Basically an alternative to windows would be windows.
 

TheMan

Member
Yeah they could do it, but they’ll charge 6 grand for it. Go make a new watch instead Tim
 
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gatti-man

Member
Apple isn’t serious. They never have been and never will be. Because to make gaming PCs they’d need to actually have relatively open hardware design.
 

Stooky

Member
Apple isn’t serious. They never have been and never will be. Because to make gaming PCs they’d need to actually have relatively open hardware design.
their system is closed just like playstation and nintendo which probably is a good thing. would be easier to port games to and developer for. they just need more games that take advantage of the hardware. if m2/m3 became their base……if just got a m2 in a appletv with in the next 5 years….
 
It'd be extremely interesting to see what kind of gaming performance they could get out of that closed system with optimization, proprietary stuff, no Windows and without a billion different kinds of hardware combinations and drivers.

I can only say that I'm insanely impressed by my new MacBook Pro 14 M3. I'm using it with Lightroom and Photoshop to work with loads of 61MP RAW photos and it's just smooth as butter and lighting fast.

It's slightly faster than working with my desktop PC that packs an AMD Ryzen 5900X and an RTX 3080 (these apps use mostly CPU but some GPU as well for acceleration). The machines have similarly specced RAM and SSDs.

That is mind-blowing to me for a laptop that draws a small fraction of the power consumption in comparison.
 
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sn0man

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.
Aren’t they responsible for counter strike? Someone better tell Gabe he’s about to rule Apple land because last I saw they shredded the macOS version of CS2.
 

NotMyProblemAnymoreCunt

Biggest Trails Stan
steve carrell anchorman GIF by FirstAndMonday
 

reinking

Gold Member
If Apple bought Sony, I would probably quit console gaming altogether. Fuck Apples overpriced bullshit.
I see this a lot and I will only speak from my own experience. When I bought my last tablet, I went with an iPad Air. Why? It was cheaper than the Microsoft Surface I was looking at. When I bought my last phone, I went back to iOS with the iPhone 13. The Samsung I was looking at the time was more expensive. The OnePlus was a bit cheaper but I decided to go back to iOS for Apple Pay (which is freaking awesome). I know there are expensive Apple products out there but not everyone has to buy the most expensive available to enjoy a good product. Just like not every PC gamer has to have a 4090 to enjoy PC gaming.
 

UltimaKilo

Gold Member
I am all for more options so I am not opposed to Apple holding a stronger position in the market, but I feel like I heard the same types of arguments when Mac went x86.

Except, Apple’s custom silicone is blowing away everything else on the market. With the recent slide that showed the roadmap for the next 3 years, nobody is coming close to catching them. Shit, others are still trying to catch up to the M1.
 

MarkMe2525

Gold Member
Except, Apple’s custom silicone is blowing away everything else on the market. With the recent slide that showed the roadmap for the next 3 years, nobody is coming close to catching them. Shit, others are still trying to catch up to the M1.
Per performance watt sure, but overall raster and compute surely falls behind the dedicated gpu that are available for windows platforms.

Edit: to be clear, I'm no pc guro
 
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Topher

Identifies as young
Except, Apple’s custom silicone is blowing away everything else on the market. With the recent slide that showed the roadmap for the next 3 years, nobody is coming close to catching them. Shit, others are still trying to catch up to the M1.

We are talking about games though. Not Cinebench and Adobe stuff.
 
Except, Apple’s custom silicone is blowing away everything else on the market. With the recent slide that showed the roadmap for the next 3 years, nobody is coming close to catching them. Shit, others are still trying to catch up to the M1.
If they pushed the software for once and with the new hardware advantage (or equality) the have they could shift a few customers to game on Mac. I don’t mind there being few games on Mac personally as it keeps me more productive.
 

DenchDeckard

Moderated wildly
Imagine apple fanboys going to war over their preferred plastic games console box from apple. Would be legendary to witness.
 

reinking

Gold Member
Imagine apple fanboys going to war over their preferred plastic games console box from apple. Would be legendary to witness.
How so? It would be the same as what we have today with an additional "team." What would we call them? We have Nintendorks, Sony Ponies and Green Rats. Apple Worms? Big Macs? Macholes?
 

ResurrectedContrarian

Suffers with mild autism
For the people going on about the price... the thing is, absolutely tons of people already have high-end Mac laptops for work.

It's the laptop which completely dominates the market in so many different fields. It's getting pretty rare that I see any professional with a non-Mac high end laptop.

So, like many others, for a very long time I have been able to count on owning a pretty recent Mac from work--always paid for by my employer (several different employers, since this stretches back over most of 2 decades and even through side jobs that gave me an extra one)--and being able to also game on it is fantastic. I think that's the market they're targeting. There isn't an "apple premium" for the absolutely overwhelming numbers of people who already have Mac laptops.
 
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I see this a lot and I will only speak from my own experience. When I bought my last tablet, I went with an iPad Air. Why? It was cheaper than the Microsoft Surface I was looking at. When I bought my last phone, I went back to iOS with the iPhone 13. The Samsung I was looking at the time was more expensive. The OnePlus was a bit cheaper but I decided to go back to iOS for Apple Pay (which is freaking awesome). I know there are expensive Apple products out there but not everyone has to buy the most expensive available to enjoy a good product. Just like not every PC gamer has to have a 4090 to enjoy PC gaming.
If you price out a good quality pre-built Windows PC or a good quality Windows laptop, pricing is really comparable to a Mac or MacBook. The $300 Walmart Black Friday laptops can't be compared in terms of build quality and components. The days when Macs actually cost a lot more than the equivalent PC are pretty far in the past, but it's pretty interesting to see how brands known for being premium still carry the perception of being expensive even when they are not.

And yeah, it's well-known in the mobile phone industry that Apple sets the pricing, everyone else prices based on what Apple charges. Samsung Galaxy is every bit as expensive as iPhone for this reason. All other Android phones also set prices based on what Apple's prices are and then undercut by a certain percentage. This is why whenever Apple has raised prices, everyone else raises their prices too, because the whole industry's pricing is set by Apple.

It's been interesting watching headphone pricing adjusting the past few years in the same way after Apple entered that market, and I expect prices of watches will also fall in line the same way within the decade. Apple has that kind of market power, everyone else has to get out of Apple's way when it comes to what stuff costs to consumers.

This isn't an Apple-only phenomenon, everyone knows that AMD sets the pricing of their GPU's based on what Nvidia's prices are. Nvidia controls GPU market pricing, AMD and Intel simply look at what Nvidia charges and undercut a certain amount.
 
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StereoVsn

Member
If you price out a good quality pre-built Windows PC or a good quality Windows laptop, pricing is really comparable to a Mac or MacBook. The $300 Walmart Black Friday laptops can't be compared in terms of build quality and components. The days when Macs actually cost a lot more than the equivalent PC are pretty far in the past, but it's pretty interesting to see how brands known for being premium still carry the perception of being expensive even when they are not.

And yeah, it's well-known in the mobile phone industry that Apple sets the pricing, everyone else prices based on what Apple charges. Samsung Galaxy is every bit as expensive as iPhone for this reason. All other Android phones also set prices based on what Apple's prices are and then undercut by a certain percentage. This is why whenever Apple has raised prices, everyone else raises their prices too, because the whole industry's pricing is set by Apple.

It's been interesting watching headphone pricing adjusting the past few years in the same way after Apple entered that market, and I expect prices of watches will also fall in line the same way within the decade. Apple has that kind of market power, everyone else has to get out of Apple's way when it comes to what stuff costs to consumers.

This isn't an Apple-only phenomenon, everyone knows that AMD sets the pricing of their GPU's based on what Nvidia's prices are. Nvidia controls GPU market pricing, AMD and Intel simply look at what Nvidia charges and undercut a certain amount.
Let's not get crazy here. MBPro 16" with 12 CPU cores (6-6 config) and 18 GPU cores with 18GB of RAM and 512GB storage (lol) runs $2500. If you bump up storage and RAM, it will run you like $3K+ (have to do custom from Apple). Memory bandwidth is 150GB/s on this one so its kind of gimped. I have this laptop (1TB) and gaming performance is nowhere near $2,500 Windows gaming laptops, which is fine for my purpose. If you want to go up next step from there that's another $400 for 30 GPU Core M3 Max and that still only delivers 300GB/s bandwidth. Only highest M3 Max version gets you 450gb/s, and at that point you are paying $4K+ for a laptop (plus tax or VAT for EU/UK).

So while new Apple silicon hardware is very power efficient and provides very good performance per watt... its not as good as properly dedicated gaming laptop, not to mention desktop. You can get a top notch laptop from Lenovo, Asus or Acer with 32GB RAM, 1 or 2TB drive (probably faster vs MBPro) and a mobile 4080. Now, obviously Mac has its own advantages... but not for gaming.

Also, for folks who have Mac laptops from their employers... most of them wont' be able to install Steam or Games due to company policies. If Apple was somewhat serous about gaming, they would release something similar to Mac Studio configured to target gaming market for a more reasonable price (say $1,500 - 2,000), but they won't since it would eat into their Professional sales. After all, if I can buy a "gaming Mac" for less vs Pro Mac but it has essentially same performance, guess what I would buy?
 
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DenchDeckard

Moderated wildly
How so? It would be the same as what we have today with an additional "team." What would we call them? We have Nintendorks, Sony Ponies and Green Rats. Apple Worms? Big Macs? Macholes?

I was just kidding really. I can actually see apple making a competent push if they dedicated themselves to it.

What colour would they be?

We have green, blue and red.
 

iHaunter

Member
First they need to get their hardware in order. The M1-3 chips are pieces of garbage. You're limited to 1 external screen without needing a dock.
 

Topher

Identifies as young
You cannot without external devices. Their silicon is trash. Can't work out dual screens.


Depends on whether he has Macbook or Mac mini.

"While the M1, M2 or M3 MacBooks natively support just one monitor, the M1 and M2 Mac Mini does natively support up to two external monitors—one via the HDMI port and a second via USB-C. "

Laughable that this is even a problem on Macbooks though.
 
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I was just kidding really. I can actually see apple making a competent push if they dedicated themselves to it.

What colour would they be?

We have green, blue and red.
Apple will literally rip them a new asshole if they create a dedicated gaming chip for a home console, integrate it with icloud, make it affordable, and maybe even do something like buy Valve.
 

A.Romero

Member
Linux is becoming a gaming paradise before the Apple ecosystem does. The point is moot, though. PC customization is a big part of PC gaming and I don't see Apple openning up in a meaningful way.

They do have powerful chips but that's not all that is required to offer a competent ecosystem, specially this late into the game. I'm up for more options and I wish Apple exclusive users do get access to more gaming goodness but I don't think they will storm the market. Even on non gaming PC applications, the Apple market share is of about 20% where they are truly competent.
 

poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
Apple will literally rip them a new asshole if they create a dedicated gaming chip for a home console, integrate it with icloud, make it affordable, and maybe even do something like buy Valve.
Rip who a new asshole? Steam is the competition so how can they rip them a new asshole if they own them?
 

Soodanim

Member
Rip who a new asshole? Steam is the competition so how can they rip them a new asshole if they own them?
Forget who, I want to know how and why Apple are going to literally rip someone a new arsehole. Are they going to use their Apple chip console to do it?
 

StereoVsn

Member
I have two in my M2 that work just fine at 1440p 144hz?
The vanilla M chips on the laptops only support a single monitor out. So the Macbook Air and new MB Pro M3 vanilla (that naming is just ...) can do 1 monitor over USB-C/HDMI. M 1-3 Pro / Max chips can support multiple monitors.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Apple will literally rip them a new asshole if they create a dedicated gaming chip for a home console, integrate it with icloud, make it affordable, and maybe even do something like buy Valve.
All actions I do not think Apple would do :/… Look at the Mac Pro (basically dead), look at the bare minimum effort they are doing to support games, and 😂 they could of course afford Valve but they are not for big acquisitions or spending lots of money. Gaming is a low low priority for Apple.
 

deriks

4-Time GIF/Meme God
It's been a while that Apple does that, still, games are not really coming. It's here and there, and basically the only company that does the marketing is Apple itself, and even the ports are questionable if the primary devs of the game are involved or, again, Apple itself is

Still², I'm all for a new real competitor. Everyone talks like Steam=PC, while Macs and even fucking iPhones can do fine
 
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